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Origin of resorcin International Scientific Vocabulary res- (from Latin resina resin) + orcin, a phenol (C7H8O2) First Known Use: circa 1868 Learn More about resorcin Medical Dictionary: Definition of "resorcin" Seen and Heard What made you want to look up resorcin? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
Then YAHUSHA said to Moses, “Dedicate and set-aside every firstborn among Yisharal to Me. The firstborn child and offspring to be born of both man and beast now belongs to Me.” FIRSTBORNS IN SCRIPTURE ALWAYS REFER TO MALES. LATER THE LEVITE TRIBE (SONS OF LEVI) WOULD REPLACE THESE FIRSTBORNS AS A ROUNDABOUT SUBSTITUTE AND A PRIESTHOOD SET-APART TO SERVE YAHUSHA AND HIS TABERNACLE. So Moses said to the people, “Remember this day forever throughout all your generations for it’s the day that you finally left Egypt, out of the torture of your slavery. Today Yahuah your Alahim has brought you out by the power of His mighty hand upon you. And don’t forget to eat no food containing leaven (yeast). On this day in early spring, in the month of Abib (March/April), you have been set free by Yahuah and you must celebrate this event at this appointed time every year, even after Yahuah brings you into the land of the Canaanites, Kittites, Amorites, Kuis and Jebusites, which He swore to your ancestors that He would give you, a land owing with milk and honey. For seven days the bread you eat must not have leaven in it, then on the seventh day, we celebrate a feast to Yahuah. Eat bread without yeast during those seven days. In fact, there must be no leavened bread or any yeast at all found within the borders of your land during this time. And you must explain to your children that you are observing this festival because of what Yahuah did for you when you left Egypt. And it shall be a sign, seen in the way you live, in your behavior and a constant reminder to you so that the Instructions of Yahuah stay guarded on your mind and in your mouth, for with a strong hand your deliverer Yahuah has brought you out of Egypt. So you shall guard these instructions at its appointed time from year to year. And this is what you must do when Yahuah fulfills the promise He swore to you and to your fathers before you. When He gives you the land where the Canaanites now live, YOU MUST HAND OVER ALL THE FIRSTBORN SONS AND FIRSTBORN MALE ANIMALS TO HIM, FOR THEY NOW OFFICIALLY BELONG TO YAHUAH. A firstborn donkey may be bought back from Yahuah by ransoming a lamb or young goat in its place. But if you do not buy it back, you must break its neck. However, YOU MUST BUY BACK EVERY FIRSTBORN SON. And in the future, when your children ask, ‘What does all this mean?’ You will tell them, ‘With the power of His mighty hand, Yahuah brought us out of Egypt, that hideous place of our slavery and bondage. The wicked Pharaoh’s rock-hard heart stubbornly refused to let us go, so Yahuah killed all the rstborn males throughout all the land of Egypt, both people and animals. That is why I now sacrifice all the firstborn males to Yahuah, except the rstborn sons which are always bought back. And this feast is to be sign and a reminder through all our lifestyles and behavior, that the power of Yahuah’s mighty hand brought us all out of Egypt.” When the Pharaoh finally let Yisharal go, YAHUSHA didn’t lead them along the main pathway that runs through Philistine territory (even though that was the shortest route to the Promised Land) for YAHUSHA said, “If the people are instantly faced with a battle, they might freak out, change their minds and run back to Egypt.” So He led the nation of Yisharal around through the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the children of Yisharal left Egypt fully armed from their plundering of Egypt and travelled in military formation, tribe by tribe, like an army ready for battle. And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for Joseph had made the sons of Yisharal swear to do this, saying, “Yahuah will certainly come to help you, and when He does, please take my body and bury it in the promised land with my fathers”. So Yisharal left Sukkoth and camped at Etham on the edge of the wilderness, and YAHUSHA went before them, guiding and sheltering them from the heat of the day with a great column of cloud, and He provided light and warmth at night with a mammoth pillar of fire, and this allowed them to travel through both day and night. REMEMBER WHEN YAHUSHA RAISED UP HIS ETERNAL BLOOD-COVENANT WITH AN UNCIRCUMCISED ABRAM? YAHUSHA MOVED THROUGH THE BLOOD OF THE ANIMALS HIMSELF, APPEARING AS A SMOKING FURNACE AND A LAMP OF FIRE, CUTTING THE COVENANT AND INFORMING ABRAM THAT HIS DESCENDANTS WOULD BE SLAVES IN A LAND THAT WAS NOT THEIRS BUT THAT HE WOULD BRING THEM BACK HOME TO HIS PROMISED LAND. AND HERE WE SEE THE BEGINNING OF YAHUSHA’S FULFILLMENT OF THIS PROMISE HE MADE WITH ABRAM, APPEARING AND LEADING THEM HIMSELF AS SMOKE AND FIRE . . . LEADING A MIXED MULTITUDE (GUYIM/ NATIONS) JUST AS ABRAM WAS BEFORE HIS CIRCUMCISION. THAT IS WHY THIS PROMISE WAS MADE WITH ABRAM AND NOT ABRAHAM, FOR THERE WOULD BE A MIXED MULTITUDE WHO WOULD GRAFT INTO THE BLOOD COVENANT PROMISES. And YAHUSHA did not remove the column of cloud or pillar of fire from in front of His people, in order to reassure them and remind them of His deliverance and protection. And He spoke to Moses: “Tell Yisharal to camp by Pi Hakiroth between Migdol and the sea, along the shore, across from Baal-Zephon. Then the Pharaoh will think that Yisharal is confused and trapped in the wilderness. And once again I will harden the Pharaoh’s heart, and he will chase after you. But be encouraged my son, for I have planned all this to display My power and esteem through the Pharaoh and his whole army. After this last event, the Egyptians will know without a shadow of a doubt that I am the only, one true living Alahim Yahuah!”
From October 4 to October 10, Belarus celebrates World Space Week. The foundation for future space developments and scientific and technological progress in space exploration was laid more than 70 years ago. On October 4, 1957, the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space. From that moment on, the world opened the way to space exploration. On October 10, 1967, the Treaty on Principles for the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, came into force. Today, space initiatives are under the close attention of world powers. The implementation of space programs has become an incentive for the development of many industries. The depth and effectiveness of interaction between science and production in the field of space determines the pace and prospects for economic growth of spacefaring nations. In this direction, years of fruitful cooperation between Belarus and Russia and China have strengthened the research and technological potential of our country. The launch of the Belintersat-1 satellite from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on January 15, 2016 was not just an important event and the result of many years of cooperation between the two countries, but also helped our country gain the status of a space power. Belarus also has seven allied (joint with Russia) space research programs. Currently, the scientific and technical program of the Union State “Integration-SG” is being implemented. It involves the creation of unified scientifically based standards, software and hardware and methodological support in the interests of improving the system of bringing highly demanded Earth remote sensing (ERS) space information and its processing products to Belarusian and Russian consumers. The task of our country is to be able to productively use the unique opportunities that space exploration and cooperation with other countries in the field of space opens up for us.
Academic Vocabulary 2 Words commonly used in academic settings BEEware the Ides of March Learn fun and amazing facts about the Ides of March! Ancient Greece: Chapter 8 World War 1 and 1920's era Review of WW1 and 1920's era. History of the English Colonies Review the history of the founding of the English colonies American History People Jacksonian Democracy - Reconstruction Basics of Buddhism. John Chapter 1 A review of the Gospel of John Chapter 1 Post-Classical African Kingdoms Beekeeper The Ghana to the Swahili. Revolutionary War Fire
A tooth extraction is a dental procedure that involves removing a tooth from the bone socket. For a child, this can be a scary procedure since he does not know what to expect and will often worry that the procedure will hurt. By educating your child, you may relieve some anxiety surrounding the experience. A dentist will extract your child’s tooth if the tooth is decayed to the point where a root canal is not an option. A tooth may also be extracted if the tooth is fractured beyond repair, or the mouth is overcrowded with teeth. If your child is getting braces, a dentist or orthodontist may decide to extract one or more teeth to make room for shifting teeth. An x-ray uses radiation to take an internal photograph of the tooth and its root. The x-ray allows the dentist to determine the severity of the tooth’s damage. If the tooth cannot be repaired, a new appointment will be made for the tooth extraction. According to Colgate, an antibiotic may be given before, as well as after, the procedure. This takes care of any possible infection that has been caused by the damaged tooth. Treating the infection before the extraction reduces the risk of the infection spreading. If your child is uncomfortably nervous about the procedure, speak to your doctor about anti-anxiety medication, which is typically taken at bedtime, the night before the extraction. Your child may also be given an additional pill to bring with him to the procedure. The procedure used will depend on the type of extraction. A simple extraction is performed when a visible tooth is removed. The dentist will inject the area with a numbing local anesthetic like Novocain, which will cause your child to feel pressure instead of pain during the extraction. The dentist will then rock the tooth back and forth with forceps until the tooth is loose enough to break from its ligament. If the tooth is impacted, the dentist will need to remove gum tissue to see the tooth being extracted. In this case, the dentist may give your child nitrous oxide, also called laughing gas, to relax him, or give him a stronger sedation through an IV. You should discuss the types of anesthesia available with the dentist prior to the day of the procedure, so you know the options and can better prepare your child. According to Dentistry.com, your child should wear short sleeves if he is sedated, so that the oral surgeon will have easy access to insert the IV. According to Aurora Health Care, the dentist will have your child bite firmly on gauze until the bleeding stops, and if the bleeding is excessive, the gauze will need to be changed every 20 to 30 minutes until a blood clot forms. The jaw will be slightly painful, and the dentist will usually prescribe a pain killer. In some cases, the dentist may only recommend an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory, such as ibuprofen. If your child’s face is swollen, ice can reduce the swelling. Serve only soft foods during the first 24 hours following an extraction. Foods like Jello and applesauce are acceptable and will cause minimal, if any, discomfort. After your child eats, have him rinse with salt water, but be sure he does not forcefully spit. If there are stitches, these will dissolve on their own within two weeks. It’s important that your child does not disturb the blood clot that forms after the tooth extraction. If the blood clot is dislodged, the bone is exposed to air causing a painful complication called dry socket. To avoid dry socket, do not allow your child to drink from a straw or spit while the area is healing. Although she needs to continue brushing her teeth and flossing, be sure she is not brushing directly on the extraction site. If pain becomes severe or your child develops a fever, chills, or increased swelling, seek medical attention.
Leaders and managers the words are often used interchangeably, but they are different. Those in management positions do not always possess the qualities and skills of a leader. The lack of leadership in an organization can have many negative effects on the organization’s employees and the business as a whole. Many companies, who were once strong, had knowledgeable employees and quality products and services have failed because of the lack of leadership in their organizations (French, W. 1987). Leadership is an essential quality in a manager. It is how you get your team fired up and willing to follow your plan. Leadership is a skill that can be improved with practice. The task of a manager is planning, organizing, controlling, and leading. Managers also wear a variety of hats including the figurehead role, every manager uses some time performing ritual duties; the leader role, every manager must function as a manager, motivating and hopeful employees; the liaison role, managers spend lots of time in contact with people outside their own departments, basically acting as a liaison among their departments and other people inside and outside the association; the spokesperson role, the manager is often the representative for his or her association; and the negotiator role, managers spend lots of time negotiating (Gozdz, K. 1993). A manager is expected to carry out many roles and needs to achieve them well in order to be efficient. Leaders have willing supporters and managers get consequence through other people; leaders use authority and managers must have power; leaders earn the right to lead from followers as well as with managers, the right to direct is granted by rights; leaders ask and managers tell; leaders have own power and managers have position power; and lastly, leaders mean to make changes while managers produce goods and services. When manager's procedures and practices go skewed, when organizations change ethnically and systemically, when planned initiatives change midstream, it is leadership that must provide constancy in the face of complicated times. The factor that empowers the workforce and in the end determines which organizations succeed or fail is the management of those organizations. While organization establishes specific purpose and mission, makes work creative and efficiently manages social impacts, leaders control others to keenly achieve the group's vision for achievement. Leaders help others alter the way they see themselves in the picture of the association. Leaders listen well and give confidence to others to take leadership roles within the association. Leaders appreciate that originality is born when people stop long adequate to listen and see what they have not formerly looked at or heard. When we begin to look through a leadership instead of management model, we begin to see chances in places we never really thought of before (French, W. 1987). On the whole, leadership is getting people to go after you. Leadership is, and should be a task of the manager. This leading aspect of organization involves influencing others towards the accomplishment of organizational goals. “Leaders inspire employees, converse, manage groups and teams, and direct directorial and cultural change. It is true that some time manager have obscurity in managing team, it is due to lack of arrangement, contact with team member and lack of defining vision. An effectual planning process will methodically examine the company's situation, its assumptions about the future and its present and required competencies. It will then bring the organization team to agreement on a future course and way for the firm. The output should be a vision: a sensible, believable, eye-catching future for the organization. An effectual planning procedure will as well be participative in nature. A team member then will offer input from different useful and personality viewpoints and their participation will create the buy-in necessary for triumphant accomplishment. A manager must be able to converse with team members efficiently. They need to be proficient of articulating it in dissimilar ways to dissimilar constituencies (Kotter, J.P. 1991). Great communication is the capability to take something complicated and making it easy. Managers are effectual in carrying out their responsibilities for preparation and rising employees. Managers are vigorously involved in supporting employees to meet up their training and improvement needs. Managers should have logical competence, the capability to identify, examine, and solve problems, interpersonal capability, the ability to influence, supervise, and lead, and emotional competence the aptitude to be inspired by emotional and interpersonal crises. They must also have extra traits in order to show leadership qualities. Manager need to be unshaken in their faith that what they are doing is the correct thing to do. This necessitates a certain degree of mental hardiness. Being hard is many times misunderstood. Being hard is not about the fact that you can fire people during bad times, make financial plan cutbacks or win cooperation. Being tough is standing true to your attitude in spite of challenges and hold ups or when others doubt you or your capability to succeed. This type of "hardiness" is called pledge and good managers should have it. True "hardiness" is going over the hill devoid of knowing what is on the other side. It is about staying the course through hardship. Whatsoever course you make a decision on there is always someone to tell you are wrong. There will always be obscurities that come up that will persuade you to doubt yourself and believe the opponents are right. It takes marvelous courage to map out a course and direction and observe it through. According to Gozdz, K. (1993), the major plan of a manager is to make the most of the output of the association through administrative completion. To attain this, managers must take on the following functions: association, planning, staffing, directing, controlling. A leader is someone who people logically follow through their own choice, while a manager must be obeyed (Ackerman, L. S. 1984). A manager may only have got his position of authority through time and faithfulness given to the company, not as a result of his management qualities. A leader may have no managerial skills, but his vision joins people behind him. These are the following power which can use: Expert and Informational power are concerned with abilities, facts and information, of which the holders of such abilities are able to use, to influence others that are, technicians and computer workers. Reward and Coercive power, differ from the previously mentioned, as they engage the ability to either reward or punish persons being prejudiced, in order to gain conformity. Legitimate power, is power which has been established by the very role structure of the group or association itself, and is accepted by all as right and without argument, for example in the case of the armed forces or the police force. Referent power, conversely, involves those being prejudiced, identifying with the leader. French, W. (1987) The Personnel Management Process: Human Resources Administration & Development., 6th Edn. Houghton Miflin, Bostonh Kotter, J.P. (1991) "What Leaders really do". In / The Best of the Harvard Business Review. (1991) Harvard University, Boston. p. 73-82. Ackerman, L. S. (1984). The flow state: A new view of organizations and managing. In John D. Adams (Eds.), Transforming work: A collection of organizational transformation readings, (pp. 114-137), Alexandria, VA: Miles River Press. Gozdz, K. (1993). Building community as leadership discipline. In Michael Ray & Alan Rinzler (Eds.), The new paradigm in business, pp. 107-119. New York: Simon and Schuster Publishers.
There are four types of anthropoids frequently found on worlds with divergence points closer than ~5 Mya (TAQ 6 or less). Taxonomy is a controversial mess across timelines, particularly for anything resembling humanity, so in this case common names are more useful than (frequently revised) scientific precision. All types use tools and have some form of language. They are considered “indigenous persons” rather than “animals” in international law and protected under the UN Charter. Humans are genetically indistinguishable from baseline residents. Behaviorally modern humans (BMH) are found on TAQ 3-4 worlds and exhibit the same range of cultural and linguistic traits as baseline humans. Anatomically modern humans (AMH) are found on TAQ 5 worlds, where they typically demonstrate a more conservative set of traits, with less scope for creativity and innovation. Yet when exposed to more diverse cultures (especially as children), they rapidly adapt and have no trouble assimilating new concepts and skills from then on. Basajaunak (singular basajaun, Basque, “hairy mountain people,” thought to be a cultural memory of the last surviving Neanderthals in baseline Europe) are the modern-day descendants of Homo sapiens neaderthalis, and can be found on TAQ 4-5 worlds. They are slightly shorter than humans on average but more robust, with a larger, more elongated skull. They are adept in their home environments, but do not adapt quickly to novelty. Their languages are simple and direct, about equivalent to human pidgins (but not advancing to the creole stage). They have hair rather than fur, wear clothing, and use fire (TEC 1). They are sometimes colloquially referred to as wild people of the woods or woodwoses. The alternate term “trog” is extremely pejorative. Dasheng (Chinese, “great sage,” one of the titles of Sun Wukong in The Journey to the West) are the living descendants of Homo erectus, which died out on baseline around 145 kya after living in Asia for two million years. As such, they can be found on TAQ 5-6 worlds. Dasheng are small, furred, bipedal, and on the low end of human intelligence. They make simple tools and can use fire (TEC 0). They have speech (sounds with recognizable and consistent meaning) but not language; they can be taught human words and (especially) signs. They are curious, learn quickly through imitation, and often employ a variety of human tools (when they can get them). Alternate names include agogwe, goblins, imps, iratxoak, maricoxi, and sehite. Mangani (“great ape” – which also refers to humans – from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels) are the descendants of genus Paranthropus, which became extinct on baseline around 1.2 Mya; hence, they are found only on TAQ 6 worlds. They are larger and stronger than humans, bipedal, and furred. They have speech (but not language) and can make and use simple tools. In the wild they typically do not make fire, but can exploit it if it occurs naturally (TEC 0). Mangani are more diverse than other forms of anthropoid, ranging from timid vegetarians to extremely aggressive carnivores; this makes it difficult to assess their overall intelligence. Common nicknames include bugbear, grendel, ogre, oni, pongo, sasquatch, wendigo, yeren, and yeti, but should be used with caution: it’s not wise to upset a Mangani. These are the “major races” of the Picaresque setting. The current-Earth term is “homonin,” but I use “anthropoid” for a more pulpish feel. One thing to keep in mind is that these are not the species found in the fossil record on our Earth, but their game-present descendants in timelines where they were able to survive. As such, they may differ as markedly from their ancestors as we do. The descriptions are intended to establish them as viable, if challenging, options for PCs at some point. The alternate names are also a clue that perhaps some of them have leaked through to baseline Earth by mechanisms other than the space-going shift drive.
Researchers from The Australian National University have shed some light on why some countries are more reluctant to agree to an international carbon price than others. Australia announced Tuesday it would link its deeply contested emissions trading scheme with the European Union's from mid-2015 in an effort to combat climate change. The European Commission made a bid Wednesday to fix the EU's sickly Emissions Trading Scheme, calling for a delay in the auction timetable over 2013 to 2020 in order to prop up prices. The European Union should scrap a controversial carbon tax on air travel and seek a global solution to the emissions problem, the global aviation industry's chief said on Wednesday. Australia's new carbon tax received a cool reception in a poll Monday, showing Prime Minister Julia Gillard's mechanism to tackle climate change is unpopular and her government on track to lose office. Australia on Sunday introduced a controversial carbon tax in a bid to tackle climate change, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard hailing the move amid opposition warnings it will stifle industry. EU officials said Sunday they will negotiate with international partners angry at what they see as a climate tax on airlines, but refused to change hotly disputed legislation despite fears in Germany. EU climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard on Monday called on countries fighting an airlines carbon emissions fee to propose concrete action to fight climate change. A split widened within the aviation industry Tuesday over EU charges for carbon emissions, as Europe's low-cost carriers accused Chinese and US rivals of "gunboat" diplomacy against the system. China said Monday it has banned its airlines from complying with an EU scheme to impose charges on carbon emissions opposed by more than two dozen countries including India, Russia and the United States.
A boil is a localized infection in the skin that starts off as a red tender area. The area becomes firm and hard and eventually the center of the boil softens and fills up with white blood cells, known as pus, which help to fight off infection. A boil is also known as a skin abscess. Vitamin C can help to prevent the formation of boils and help your skin to heal. Boils can be caused by sweat glands becoming blocked, which leads to infection, and a break in the skin such as a cut or a scrape can lead to abscesses forming. Vitamin C helps to heal the wounds caused by boils and abscesses as it helps the body to make collagen and helps to form new tissue, according to the University of Maryland Medical Center. Acne is a skin condition that is caused by a buildup of sebum in the pores of the skin. Severe acne causes deep boils and abscesses to form under the surface of the skin which, when picked or squeezed, can lead to scaring. MedLine Plus reports vitamin C can help to heal the skin and reduce the appearance of such scarring. Removal of Toxins Food Allergy Solutions states that too many toxins in the body can cause the skin to become inflamed and lead to the formation of spots and boils. According to Natural Acne Solution, vitamin C is the most important adult acne fighting vitamin as it helps to remove toxins and other pollutants from the body and prevents toxins in the body from damaging the skin. Free radicals in the body can lead to a process known as oxidization, which affects the skin and can cause the formation of boils and abscesses. Free radicals are caused by stress, not getting enough sleep, pollution, smoking, drinking too much alcohol and eating too many unhealthy foods. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that can help to block the damage caused by free radicals, preventing the formation of boils.
A new research has determined that the health effects of war are not limited to battlefield injuries, and are also bound to exact a heavy toll on civilian mental health. According to a report in New Scientist, the research involved the survey of nearly 3,000 Lebanese civilians to measure the effects of war on the prevalence of mental illness. Though it is a well-known fact that war can leave its mark on soldiers in the form of mental disorders that may take months or years to become apparent, few studies have looked into wars effects on the civilian population. Now, Elie Karam of the Institute for Development, Research, Advocacy, and Applied Care in Beirut, Lebanon, and colleagues, surveyed 2857 Lebanese adults with a standardised questionnaire to measure the incidence and age of onset of any mental disorders. The effects of exposure to war were pronounced. Seventy per cent of the respondents suggested they had been exposed to traumatic events related to the country's ongoing conflict, such as being in a war zone or being a refugee. Those exposed to war events were six times more likely to have an anxiety disorder than those who had not, three times more likely to have a mood disorder, and 13 times more likely to have an impulse-control disorder. The team also found that only one in four Lebanese people experience a mental disorder at some stage in their lives - in line with the proportion found in the developed world. That low number could be due to poor diagnosis, however, as less than half of the survey respondents sought any treatment for their disorders, and those who did took an average of six years to do so. Even given these caveats, the incidence of mental disorder might be expected to be higher in a country that has seen decades of war. According to study co-author Somnath Chatterji of the World Health Organization, both cultural stigma about mental disorders and a dearth of professionals contribute to the prevalence of disorders and the delay in treatment. "Although the overall number of physicians in Lebanon is high, the availability of mental health services is quite limited," he said. The solution, he suggested, is first to educate both the populace and the policymakers about mental disorders. "The first thing is to make the case that mental health is part of overall health, and to show that there exist effective interventions for these disorders," said Chatterji.
bout 3 billion years ago, the earth suffered a mass extinction caused by catastrophic volcanic activity in Siberia and wildfires that covered the entire planet. Since then, four more mass extinction events eradicated up to 80% of all species each time. The world’s community of climatologists and scientists overwhelmingly agree that we are now on the verge of a sixth mass event that, over the next few tens of thousands of years, will wipe out nearly all living species on Earth, including mankind. This is not the stuff of science fiction or speculation, but rather the studied view of the experts who are most qualified to make this kind of assessment. As anthropologist Richard Leaky, author of The Sixth Extinction, wrote in 1995, “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims” (2). This leaves us with two issues worth reflecting on: 1.Does the rate at which people are reproducing need to be controlled to save the environment? 2.To what extent does human population growth impact global warming, and what can be done about it (3)? The answer to the first is quite simply “yes,” but the solution to the second is more problematic. The damage humans do to the climate is ruining the atmosphere surrounding the planet; at the rate this damage is increasing, there will eventually be no atmosphere left to protect life on Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Compared with other planets in our solar system, Earth has mild temperatures, thanks largely to an atmosphere protected from harmful gases. However, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (around 1775), damaging gases have become stuck in the atmosphere. This causes some of the heat radiating from the sun—that which does not exit into space—to reflect back to Earth. The result is that oceans have become warmer, and glaciers are melting, including parts of Antarctica. If we think of Antarctica as the stopper in a bottle, its disappearance by melting away will release the water it holds, raising sea levels to uncontrollable levels and flooding coastal regions for miles inland. The two main culprits for this warming trend are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). These gases, called “greenhouse gases,” are trapped by the earth’s atmosphere and, in turn, heat up the entire planet. It is worth noting that warming oceans are killing off kelp beds throughout the earth’s oceans and coastlines at a prodigious rate. Not only do hundreds of millions of people depend on the fish that thrive on this ecosystem, but kelp is a natural absorbent of CO2 and purifies both the water and the air we breathe. A growing population that consumes natural resources is partially to blame for the release of greenhouse gases, as are deforestation, soil erosion, and farming (overturned dirt releases CO2). However, the real issue is the burning of fossil fuels (hydrocarbons) such as coal oil and natural gas, which is produced by the organic remains of prehistoric organisms. The release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) such as refrigerants, propellants in aerosol sprays, and solvents contributes heavily to the depletion of the ozone layer in the earth’s stratosphere. At the current rate at which these gases and CFCs are released into the atmosphere, affecting the earth’s ecosystems and level of biodiversity, the earth’s surface temperature will increase by about two degrees Fahrenheit. This will cause a change weather patterns across the globe. In December 2017, the World Bank stated, “Climate change is an acute threat to global development and efforts to end poverty. Without urgent action, climate impacts could push an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030” (4). 1.George Gitlitz. 2018. Opinion: The pernicious climate dictum–don’t mention population. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/06/19/opinion-the-pernicious-climate-dictum-dont-mention-population 2.Gemma Tarlach. 2018. Mass Extinctions. http://discovermagazine.com/2018/jul-aug/mass-extinctions 3.Larry LeDoux. 2018. Does Population Growth Impact Climate Change. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-growth-climate-change/ 4.Bill McKibben. 2018. A Very Grim Forecast. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/11/22/global-warming-very-grim-forecast/ The world’s population is expanding at a such a fast rate that some natural resources are being stripped from the environment. Global institutions are working to prevent both the loss of these resources and the consequences of not having access to them. In this first assignment, research the impact of population growth on society. Write a whitepaper for the UN that consists of a minimum of four pages (not including the cover letter). Your assignment is to assess the impact of population growth, citing at least five credible sources in your research. As you compose the whitepaper, review the United Nations list of developing countries (available on the United Nations website). Select one country from the United Nations list of developing countries to use as an example throughout your assignment. The completed version of this assignment will include the following items: - Cover page: Include your name, course title, the country you have selected from the UN list of developing countries, current date, and the name of your instructor. - Introduction: Introduce the topic of the whitepaper (half-page minimum). - One-page (minimum) answers (for a total of three pages) to each of the following questions: - What are greenhouse gases, and how do they contribute to global warming? - What economic, security, political, and other challenges do these emissions pose to the people of the developing world, and who are the biggest offenders? - Is there a way to control the growth of population on a global level? Note: Give examples in your responses to each of the above questions as it relates to the developing country you have chosen. - Conclusion: Provide a minimum of a one-half page conclusion. Cite at least five credible sources excluding Wikipedia, dictionaries, and encyclopedias for your assessment. A brief list of suggested resources has been provided at the end of the course guide. This course requires use of Strayer Writing Standards (SWS). The format is different compared to other Strayer University courses. Please take a moment to review the SWS documentation for details. (Note: You’ll be prompted to enter your Blackboard login credentials to view these standards.) The specific course learning outcome associated with this assignment is:
What is HIV? And what is AIDS? Find answers to some common questions in this section. How is HIV transmitted - and how is it not transmitted? Find out the answers in this section. Worried you might have HIV? Have an HIV test - it's the only way to know for sure. HIV treatment is not a cure, but it is keeping millions of people well. Start learning about it in this section. In this section we have answered some of the questions you might have if you have just found out you have HIV. Find healthcare services and support. An introduction to key issues about HIV treatment and living with HIV, presented as a series of illustrated leaflets. Our award-winning series of booklets, with each title providing a comprehensive overview of one aspect of living with HIV. A range of interactive tools to support people living with HIV to get involved in decisions about their treatment and care. A one-page reference guide to the anti-HIV drugs licensed for use in the European Union, with information on formulation, dosing, key side-effects and food restrictions. Find contact details for over 900 key organisations in more than 189 countries An instant guide to HIV & AIDS in countries and regions around the world The most comprehensive listing of HIV-related services in the UK NAM is an official media partner for the 21st International AIDS Conference 18 March 2016This week, the International AIDS Society announced its media partnerships... Coming soon: news from CROI 2016 18 February 2016The annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) is being... New edition of HIV & sex booklet 11 February 2016A new edition of our HIV & sex booklet is now available online,...
- Culture Enzymes Minerals & Vitamins Amylase is an enzyme that plays a crucial role in the digestion of carbohydrates. It is produced naturally in the body, primarily by the salivary glands and the pancreas. The main function of amylase is to break down complex carbohydrates, such as starch and glycogen, into simpler sugars like maltose and glucose, which can be easily absorbed and utilized by the body for energy. When it comes to amylase supplementation, it's important to note that it is not a common dietary supplement. Potential health effects of amylase supplementation, when used appropriately and under medical supervision, may include: - Improved carbohydrate digestion: Supplementing with amylase can assist individuals who have specific conditions affecting their natural amylase production, such as pancreatic insufficiency or certain enzyme deficiencies. - Enhanced nutrient absorption: By aiding in the breakdown of complex carbohydrates - Reduced digestive discomfort: In cases where carbohydrate digestion is compromised, supplementation with amylase might alleviate symptoms like bloating, gas, and indigestion. Ianiro, Gianluca, et al. "Digestive Enzyme Supplementation in Gastrointestinal Diseases." Current Drug Metabolism, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 187-193.
Calophasia lunula (Hufnagel, 1766) Toadflax Brocade Moth Calophasia lunula is an introduced small (FW length 12 - 13 mm) brown and gray moth with white-filled forewing spots and a pattern of black streaks between veins in the subterminal area that flies in dry forests in eastern Washington, southern British Columbia, and northeastern Oregon during the summer. The forewing is mottled gray-brown with light gray patches at the wing base, and the posterior subterminal area, and in the terminal area. The wing is darkest in the median area and mid and anterior subterminal area. A black basal dash is present, ending at the base of a white-filled claviform spot. The antemedial and postmedial lines are double, filled with light brown. The antemedial line is only clearly defined on the costa and near the trailing margin. The postmedial lie is visible on the costa and as a concave segment below the reniform spot. A dark median line extends across the the wing. The postmedial line is not defined, but a series of parallel black lines are present between the veins on the terminal wing, thick in the subterminal area and thinner in the terminal area. A thin terminal line is preset. The fringe is strongly checkered with gray-brown and white. The orbicular and reniform spots are thinly outlined in black and filled with white. The orbicular spot is small narrow oval. The reniform spot is narrow and kidney-shaped. The hindwing is pale brownish white, with gray veins and marginal band. A small thin discal spot and remnants of a postmedial line are present in some specimens. The hindwing fringe is white with a light tan base. The head and thorax are gray-brown with black, white, and brown transverse barring on the collar. The male antenna is filiform. This species can be identified by the brown and gray forewing marked with white spots, parallel black lines near the margin, and a strongly checkered fringe. This species is widely distributed in dry grasslands across much of Eurasia. It was introduced into the Pacific Northwest as a biocontrol agent, but is narrowly restricted to foothill habitats east of the Cascades in Washington and in Hells Canyon on the Oregon-Idaho border at the present time. Calophasia lunula is found most commonly along the east slope of the Cascade Range and the forests north of the Columbia Basin in southern British Columbia and northeastern Washington. It also occurs in the vicinity of Hells Canyon in northeastern Oregon. This species is a native of Eurasia and was introduced deliberately as a biocontrol agent for toadflax (Linaria spp.). It is found in the Northwest and in the East from the Midwest to New Brunswick and south to West Virginia. This species is a foodplant specialist feeding on Eurasian species of toadflax (Linaria spp.) in the Scrophulariaceae, and was introduced into the Pacific Northwest as a biocontrol agent against infestations of this exotic plant. This species flies from late spring to August in our area. It is nocturnal and comes to lights. Calophasia lunula appears to be relatively ineffective as a control agent for Linaria. No harmful effects of its introduction are known to us.
Journal of Adult Education Volume 42, Number 1, 2013 Enhancing ESL Vocabulary Development Through the Use of Mobile Technology Applications, or apps, that are available for both smart phones and tablets can be an effective tool for promoting vocabulary development among adult learners in English as a second language programs. An app is a software program for a mobile phone or computer operating system. Examples of such apps are provided along with practical recommendations for their use by teachers and students. Increasingly, much of that interaction takes place via technology. Employers, schools, neighborhood associations, and even family members now routinely communicate critical, time-sensitive information first electronically–with other forms of correspondence taking more of a back seat. Like native speakers of English, today’s adult ESL students must learn to navigate new technologies in order to fully participate in the prevalent technological discourse community (Fox & Fleischer, 2002). To this end, Ball (2011), Larsen-Freeman and Andersen (2011), and others (e.g., Hopey, 1999; Warschauer & Meskill, 2000) recommend that ESL teachers incorporate current technology into ESL teaching and learning. Ball (2011), drawing on a thorough review of the literature, describes a number of benefits of technology use in adult ESL teaching and learning. Examples include (a) opportunities for increased learner autonomy and student choice, (b) transferability of skills to other areas of life (including work), (c) increased student engage- Adult learners in English as a second language (ESL) programs across the United States range in age from 19 to well into their retirement years. They have varied interests, abilities, goals and aspirations. They come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and possess a wide range of educational, work, and life experiences (Burt, Peyton, & Adams, 2003; National Center for ESL Literacy Education, 2002). Although they are learning to speak, listen, read, and write English, these adult students bring a wealth of background knowledge and experience to the ESL In most cases, adult students attend ESL classes with the aim of improving their lives as employees, family members, and individuals (National Center for ESL Literacy Education, 2003). As they interact daily in work, family, and social settings, they must be able to communicate effectively in spoken and written English. ment/motivation, (d) immediate, precise feed-back, and (e) ease of tracking progress toward the individual’s Technology is rapidly changing with today’s innovations soon becoming outdated; however, it is clear that teachers and students must begin with current technology and continue to build upon their knowledge as technological advances unfold. Two popular forms of current technology which can be highly beneficial for ESL students are smart phones (such as the iPhone by Apple or the android Samsung Galaxy) and tablets (such as the Google Nexus or Apple’s iPad). Many students already own or have access to one (or more) of these mobile devices, and those who do not may find it a worthwhile investment. A key feature of both smart phones and tablets is the availability of applications, or apps, many of which can be downloaded for free or at little cost. Simply put, an app is a software program for a mobile phone or computer operating system (American Dialect Society, 2011). Most users of smart phones and tablets quickly learn how to use apps – sometimes even receiving instruction on how to do so at the time of purchase. A second important feature of smart phones and tablets is their portability, which makes it possible for users to access apps while “on the go” or while engaged in a specific learning task. Because of these features, mobile devices can be highly effective tools for use in language teaching and learning. One domain of ESL teaching and learning where the use of mobile devices can be particularly powerful is the area of vocabulary This article provides practical recommendations and resources for promoting vocabulary development among adult ESL students who have access to mobile devices. We begin with a review of the literature on vocabulary teaching and learning in an adult ESL context and then present a compilation of recommended apps that can be utilized on smart phones and/or tablets as tools for promoting vocabulary growth. We conclude the article with a brief look at some practical considerations and recommendations for teachers. ESL Vocabulary Teaching and Learning The vocabulary learning task for adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) is an enormous undertaking. Upon graduation from high school, the average native speaker knows approximately 40,000 to 50,000 words (Graves, 2009; Stahl & Nagy, 2006). By implication, adult learners of English need to quickly acquire a vast amount of vocabulary knowledge in order to be able to effectively and fluidly communicate with native speakers in professional, educational, and social settings. The sheer volume of words to be mastered can be overwhelming. Clearly, only a small percentage of the words to be learned can be directly taught in the This fact often leaves ESL teachers wondering how to maximize in-class instruction and at the same time equip their students to acquire and practice needed vocabulary outside of the classroom. Researchers and practitioners agree that vocabulary instruction must be multi-faceted, systematic, and rigorous in order to make a significant impact and yield long-term results (Blachowicz, Fisher, Ogle, & Watts-Taffe, 2006; Graves, 2006, 2009; Nation, 2008; Stahl & Nagy, Components of Effective Nation (2008), Graves (2009), and other prominent researchers and scholars (e.g., Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002; Stahl & Nagy, 2006) have highlighted the importance of providing learners with a comprehensive, well-balanced vocabulary-learning program. According to Graves’ (2009) model, an effective vocabulary program contains four major components: (a) teaching individual words, (b) teaching word-learning strategies, (c) providing rich and varied language experiences, and (d) fostering word consciousness. Teaching individual words. Instruction of individual words must be rich, extended, and carefully orchestrated in order to yield optimum results (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002; Graves, 2006, 2009; Nation, 2008). Due to the large volume of words to be learned, teachers must be highly strategic in selecting words for explicit instruction during class time. Teaching word-learning strategies. The importance of teaching word-learning strategies is welldocumented in the vocabulary literature (e.g., Blachowicz & Fisher, 2000; Nation, 2001, 2008). Examples of these strategies include recognizing and using cognates, using the dictionary, drawing on context clues, and analyzing word parts to unlock meaning. Providing rich and varied language experiences. Learners need to be immersed in a wide variety of language experiences so that they learn vocabulary through listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Graves, 2009). A key recommendation here is that learners be encouraged to engage in wide reading with exposure to a variety of different sources and types of text (for example, Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002; Graves, 2009; Nation, 2008). Fostering word consciousness. Word consciousness is “an awareness of and interest in words and their meanings” (Graves, 2006, p. 7). Some specific examples of ways in which teachers can promote word consciousness include modeling adept diction, promoting word play, involving students in original investigations, and teaching students about words (Graves, Each of the above components plays a unique and critical role in the learner’s development of comprehensive vocabulary knowledge. A key over-arching premise is that vocabulary knowledge is built incrementally; thus, a learner needs multiple and varied exposures to a given word in order to truly “know” it (Nagy & Scott, 2000). Rich, explicit instruction of words in the ESL classroom must be followed by extended, meaningful practice. Students need to be equipped to implement word-learning strategies both inside and outside of the ESL classroom. They need to engage in a wide variety of language experiences in which they speak, listen, read, and write in English; and they benefit tremendously from an increased awareness of and interest in words. One means of engaging students in extensive vocabulary practice and self-directed study is to encourage them to utilize vocabulary applications (or apps), which are readily available for smart phones and tablets. Vocabulary apps can be used to address each of Graves’ (2009) four recommended components; however, they are particularly useful for building word consciousness and creating rich, varied language experiences when used independently by students. Vocabulary Applications for Tablets and Smart Phones Applications, or apps, that contain dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, whiteboards, interactive quizzes, flashcards, and books are just a few of the available offerings that can enhance vocabulary learning. For an ESL student, having tools readily available at all times to help learn a new language and culture is of paramount importance. It is akin to having a library and private tutor in one hand. Presented below is a compilation of recommended applications that can be of high utility for vocabulary teaching and learning. Included are options for both android and iOS-based mobile devices; and all of the apps can be downloaded quickly and easily through popular online stores such as Apple’s The App Store or Amazon’s Appstore for Androids. It is no longer necessary for ESL teachers and students to carry large, cumbersome dictionaries, thesauruses, and/or other reference books because the app stores now offer numerous alternatives. Two popular apps which can take the place of many reference books are Dictionary.com–Dictionary & Thesaurus and The Dictionary.com app offers two million definitions as well as a thesaurus for identifying synonyms and antonyms. It provides sample sentences, audio pronunciation, and a voice search option. This can be a great help to students who not only need to know the spelling and meaning of a word but also its pronunciation. One of the most comprehensive dictionary apps is TheFreeDictionary. It contains not only a dictionary and thesaurus but also has acronyms, abbreviations, idioms, an encyclopedia, and a literature reference library. Users also have the option of creating a customized homepage that provides games, a language forum, word of the day, spelling bees, word games, and much more. students to record text in 16 languages and to convert it to many other languages. These translations are useful because students can write or speak words, phrases, and sentences in their native language and see and hear the English translation immediately. These translations can be stored and played back for use in listening and speaking practice. There are many translation apps available, with varying capabilities. Teachers and students need only explore the possibilities to find the translation app(s) to fit their unique needs. English LaunchPad App This multipurpose language app has numerous capabilities, and it offers a host of activities. The app contains over 700 flash cards with pictures in 20 categories covering topics such as the alphabet, anatomy, animals, appliances, food and drink, fruits, household words, and many other useful topics. There are also flashcards for 51 irregular verbs. The flashcards can be used for enrichment, instruction, or differentiated learning when studying vocabulary. There are additional tools such as a whiteboard, quiz generator, an electronic file for storing and sending lesson plans, and a grammar quiz containing 900 questions on grammar structures. The flashcard system can be a useful tool as students learn new vocabulary words, and the quiz generator can be used to measure progress. There are several applications that offer translation. These apps can be useful for students who have limited English proficiency and need to quickly communicate or find the English word for a native one. Single words or complete sentences can be translated at the touch of a few buttons. Some popular translation apps are Google Translate and Translator with Speech. Google Translate offers free text translation for 70 languages and speech-to-text in 17 languages. This app affords users the opportunity to listen to translations spoken aloud in 40 languages, and it will spell out the translation of non-Latin script languages such as Chinese and Japanese in Latin characters that can be read phonetically. While no translation tool is 100% accurate, Google Translate is a top-rated app for accuracy. Translator with Speech is an app that translates text into 72 languages and pronounces the translation. It contains an optional speech-to-text feature that allows Clear Speech App The Clear Speech app is based on the Cambridge University Press series by the same name, written by Judy Gilbert. This app is designed to help students improve their listening skills, and it can aid students in refining pronunciation of the vocabulary that they are learning. As students “train their ears” to hear significant differences in regard to aspects such as word and syllable stress, intonation, and word endings, they also build their capacity for acquiring new vocabulary through everyday listening The app contains interactive listening games with 10 levels of difficulty designed for students who enjoy using the computer for education. One game is Ball Toss. It helps students identify ending sounds. The Basketball game teaches students to practice listening for syllables. Push the Blob teaches stress patterns, and the Stop or Flow game teaches word sounds. The app can be used in conjunction with the Clear Speech series or used independently to give listening practice. speaking, listening, writing, and reading. The app is useful in fostering vocabulary growth because students are introduced to new words as they read questions and take part in the learning activities offered. This app is a comprehensive tool that can be used by students to prepare independently for the exam. Learn American English-Free Word Power App Learn American English–Free Word Power is a comprehensive study program designed to engage students in learning vocabulary and speaking English correctly. The free version helps students master 100 of the most commonly used words in the English language in a format that is easy to use. The student can view the words, hear a native speaker pronounce them, and record his or her own voice in order to compare this pronunciation with that of the native speaker. Students can take a quiz after learning the words to tract progress and create their own unique audio word bank for reference and review. Additional words can be purchased for a nominal fee. Idioms is an app designed to introduce students to the top 100 most frequently-used idioms and idioms used in conversation topics about animals, business, clothes and colors, food, legalities and negotiations. Students learn by taking self-administered quizzes covering topics of their choice. There is also a handy alphabetical listing of common idioms for easy reference. This is an engaging, fun app that can be used in vocabulary building. Due to the appeal of idioms, this app is a highly popular one for students. Recommendations for Use of Apps The applications presented above were chosen based on their high utility for promoting vocabulary development as well as their affordability, overall quality, and ease of use. They are all suitable for classroom use and/or independent exploration on the part of learners. Students who regularly incorporate these resources into their learning repertoires can dramatically expand their access and depth of exposure to vocabulary in speaking, listening, reading, and writing contexts. In addition, the high interest level typically generated by app-based materials can be an aid in fostering enthusiasm for words and the vocabulary learning process Teachers are encouraged to explore and experiment with these resources, share them with students, model effective use, and help students determine which apps iTooch TOEFL Prep App The iTooch TOEFL Prep app is available for iPhone and iPad users and is designed to help students prepare for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). It contains the largest pool of TOEFL questions based on US National Standards and is designed to aid in exam preparation. The app has 50 chapters that offer lessons, examples, and figures. There are over 1,500 questions with explanations, 135 images and visuals, and 278 spoken sound files. Questions address might be best suited to their interests, needs, and learning goals. It is important to note that while many students already know how to use apps, they may need some guidance on how to effectively and strategically utilize vocabulary apps to maximize their learning and reach their own goals. When introducing a new app in class, teachers can utilize the following instructional sequence (adapted from Chamot & O’Malley, 1994): (a) elicit and draw on students’ background knowledge; (b) show (rather than just tell) students how to use the app; (c) point out multiple benefits, features, and uses; (d) engage students in meaningful practice using the app; (e) have students complete an independent task using the app; and (f) provide an opportunity for students to report on the experience afterwards. Finally, because each learner’s abilities, interests, and vocabulary learning needs are unique, teachers do well to help students identify specific goals for themselves. For example, students might be challenged to set goals pertaining to the number of words to be learned per day or per week and to track their progress using a measure of their choice. Alternatively, students could use an app of their choice for a designated amount of time per day, week, or month, and then they could report on their experience either orally or in writing. Through close collaboration, teachers and students can identify many other options for self-directed learning “projects” which can be implemented both inside and outside of the formal classroom setting. a small sampling of the high quality apps that are presently available for enhancing vocabulary development. Teachers and students alike are encouraged not only to begin with these apps but also to use these tools as a launching pad for their own exploration into the vast, ever-evolving realm of technology resources for ESL teaching and learning. American Dialect Society. (2011). ‘App’ voted 2010 word of the year by the American Dialect Society. Retrieved from http://www.americandialect.org/ Ball, N. (2011). Technology in adult ESOL classes. Journal of Adult Education, 40(1), 12-19. Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life. New York: Guilford Press. Blachowicz, C., & Fisher, P. (2000). Vocabulary instruction. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosen-thal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Volume III (pp. 503-523). New York: Blachowicz, C., Fisher, P., Ogle, D., & Watts-Taffe (2006). Vocabulary: Questions from the classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 524-539. Brown, S. (2012). The top 40: Best mobile apps for handheld librarians. The Reference Librarian, 53(4), 456 - 465. Burt, M., Peyton, J. K., & Adams, R. (2003). Reading and adult English language learners: A review of the research. Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Chamot, A. U., & O’Malley, J. M. (1994). The CALLA handbook: Implementing the cognitive academic language learning approach. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Fox, D. L., & Fleischer, C. F. (2002). Discourse communities, texts, and technology in English education, English Education, 35(1), 3-5. Graves, M. F. (2006). The vocabulary book: Learning and instruction. New York: Teachers College Press. Adult ESL students face unique challenges as they attempt to master English vocabulary while at the same time balancing work, social, and family obligations. An increased use of mobile technology for vocabulary learning offers these learners the opportunity to set their own schedules, set their own pace for practice, and focus on their individual needs and goals. It can also serve as a non-threatening means of expanding their current technological knowledge base in our rapidly-evolving The resources presented in this article represent only Graves, M.F. (2009). Teaching individual words. New York: Teachers College Press, IRA. Hopey, C. (1999, Summer). Technology and adult education: Rising expectations. Adult Learning, Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2011). Techniques and principles in language teaching (3rd ed.). NY: Oxford University Press. Nagy, W. E., & Scott, J. A. (2000). Vocabulary processes. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, Vol. 3. (pp. 574-593). Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Nation, I. S. P. (2008). Teaching vocabulary: Strategies and techniques. Boston, MA: Heinle. National Center for ESL Literacy Education. (2002). Adult English language instruction in the 21st century. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Stahl, S. A., & Nagy, W. E. (2006). Teaching word meanings. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Warschauer, M., & Meskill,C. (2000). Technology and second language learning. In J. Rosenthal (Ed.), Handbook of undergraduate second language education (pp. 308-318). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Deanna Nisbet is an associate professor and chair of the M.Ed. TESOL program at Regent University. She has taught ESL and TESOL courses in a variety of settings over the past 25 years. Her research interests include second language acquisition, vocabulary development, and literacy for English Dayna Austin is an independent ESL contractor and tutor in the Hampton Roads, Virginia area. She has taught ESL in a variety of adult ESL settings in the US and abroad over the past 7 years. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format WE HUMANS are one in a million: to be exact, one species among 1,392,485, according to a recent tally by the zoologist Edward O. Wilson. Those are the ones we know: estimates of the total number of living species range from five to thirty million and up, depending on how one reckons.1 A substantial majority of Earth’s species are insects: something like 751,000 by Wilson’s tally. Plants account for another 248,428, the vast majority being flowering plants (which coevolved with insect pollinators). Among the vertebrates, bony fishes are the largest group, with 18,150 species, leaving aside the 63 species of jawless fishes and the 843 cartilaginous fishes (lampreys, sharks). Amphibia and reptiles account for 4,184 and 6,300 more species; birds for 9,040, and mammals for 4,000, give or take. Not to mention invertebrates other than insects: tunicates and cephalochordata (1,273), molluscs (roughly 50,000), and arthropods (12,161). And single-cell organisms: algae (26,900), fungi (46,983), protozoa and microbes (36,560).2 Of our fellow vertebrates we have an inventory that is nearly complete—over 90 percent, it is estimated. On the plants and invertebrates, however, we may only have made a start. We earthlings sail through the void on an ark that is impressively biodiverse. Biodiversity is a lively issue these days, mainly because of the number of species that are going extinct, either by natural causes, or because we space-hungry humans are destroying their habitats. Wilson estimates that perhaps 17,500 species (mostly insects) go extinct each year in tropical forests, and that we humans have accelerated the historical rate of extinction by a factor of one thousand to ten thousand.3 Biologists and conservationists are concerned that vast numbers of species may be forced into extinction ahead of schedule (extinction is the ultimate fate of all species) before they can be found and classified. There is concern, too, that in our ignorance we may be destroying species vital to the fabric of ecosystems on which we depend for our own survival. Systematic biology, or taxonomy, is reputed to be a humdrum, cataloging science—a reputation entirely undeserved, let it be said.4 We depend on those few among us who collect, describe, name, and classify our fellow passengers on the global ark. But how exactly do we find, collect, identify, and order those millions of species? That is my subject here: not the biology or the ethics of biodiversity, but its practices and their history. Though people have always named plants and animals, the science of species inventory is relatively new, beginning with the big bang of Carl von Linne´’s invention of the (Linnaean) binomial system of naming in the mid-eighteenth century.5 And though much has been written on theories of species, relatively little is known of the practical work that produced the empirical base for theorizing. When and how were those inventories created and made robust? Who organized and paid for collecting expeditions, collected and prepared specimens in the field, compiled lists, built museums and herbaria, and kept vast collections in good physical and conceptual order? Of these practical activities we do not as yet know much. This book is a step toward acquiring such knowledge. The history of our knowledge of biodiversity is first and foremost a history of collecting and collections. Remarkably little has been written about the craft and social history of scientific collecting: it remains a “black box,” as the historian Martin Rudwick observed a few years ago, an activity that has “barely been described by historians, let alone analyzed adequately.”6 There are now signs of a growing interest in the history of collecting science, but it is perhaps understandable why this black box is only now being opened. Although collecting is a widespread and varied obsession, modern scientific collecting is sober and businesslike, not irregular or idiosyncratic. It is done en masse and methodically, because modern taxonomy requires large and comprehensive collections. Scientific collecting is exacting and quantitative science, as methodical and organized as taking stock of galaxies, subatomic particles, or genes. Modern specimen collections are quite unlike the romantic “cabinets of curiosities” of earlier centuries. Modern herbaria consist of cases filled with hundreds of thousands of large folios of pressed plants in paper. Museum study collections are rooms of metal boxes, each with trays of animal skins and skulls in neat rows neatly labeled—all seemingly humdrum and unromantic. Yet the scientific visions that inspire collectors to go afield, and the varied activities that go into making large collections, are anything but humdrum. Collecting is an activity that has engaged diverse sorts of people—unlike laboratory science, which is restricted to a relatively few approved types.7 The botanist Edgar Anderson once did an experiment, in which he took a manila folder at random from an herbarium case (a Southwestern grass, it turned out to be), to discover the kinds of people who had collected the specimens. It was an amazingly diverse lot: a botanist on the Mexican Boundary Survey of the early 1850s; an immigrant intellectual German who had come to America in 1848 to escape political persecution; the wife of a mining engineer stationed in a remote mountain range, who dealt with the isolation by studying the local flora; a Boston gentleman, who made collecting trips to New Mexico for thirty years; a Los Alamos scientist and amateur botanist; university professors of botany; and college students who bought a second auto and spent a summer holiday collecting. “Though they have sometimes been contemptuously referred to as ‘taxonomic hay’ by other biologists,” Anderson concluded, “herbarium specimens can be quite romantic in their own dry way.”8 Anderson’s experiment is easily replicated: page through museums’ accession lists, and you will see hundreds of names of people who contributed specimens to scientific collections, from a few odd skins to tens of thousands. Read taxonomists’ checklists—which give for each species the name of the naturalist who first described it, and when—and you will glimpse a living community of collectors and naturalists stretching back 250 years, in which amateurs have the same honor and dignity as the most eminent professionals. Species collectors are as diverse as the species they collect, and no other community of scientists preserves such a deep sense of its collective identity and past. Taxonomists’ elaborate system of keeping track of names, which anchors each species to the name historically first given to it and to the actual specimen first described—the “type” specimen—keeps the past forever present. All sciences have their heroes and founding myths, but taxonomy is about the only one with a living memory of all past contributors, famous and obscure. Scientific collecting was (and is) also an unusually complex and varied kind of work. Collecting expeditions are more complex socially than anything one might find, say, in a biochemistry or gene-sequencing lab. They require a great deal of book knowledge, but also practical skills of woodcraft and logistics, as well as firsthand experience of animal habits and habitats. Modern natural history is an exacting science whose practitioners must also cope and improvise in difficult field conditions. Collecting expeditions afford an experience of nature that mixes scientific and recreational culture in a way that lab sciences never do. Collecting parties usually travel light and depend on local inhabitants for information and support, making survey collecting a diversely social experience. And because of that diversity, the identity of scientific collectors has been less fixed than that of laboratory workers. In the black box of modern expeditionary collecting, there is much of interest. We know nature through work, the environmental historian Richard White has observed, whether it is poling canoes against the current of a great river (his particular case), or building dams across it to tap its energy, or hauling fish out of it, or diverting its waters for irrigated farming—or, historians may add, studying its hydrology and natural history.9 So too is our scientific knowledge of nature acquired through the work of mounting expeditions; observing plant and animal life; and collecting, preparing and sorting specimens. Historians have only recently begun to address the work of field science.10 And of all the field sciences, natural history survey is an exceptionally inviting subject—because the work of systematic, scientific collecting is so varied. One is also struck, paging through scientific inventories of species, by the lumpiness of the history of their discovery. Species have accumulated steadily, but more rapidly in certain periods than in others. The first such period of discovery was the Linnaean: roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. Then, after a pause of a few decades in the early nineteenth century, another period of rapid discovery set in from the 1830s to the 1850s, which I shall call “Humboldtian,” after the encyclopedic author of Cosmos, Alexander von Humboldt.11 Following another pause, the pace of finding and naming again quickened from the 1880s into the 1920s, by which time a substantial proportion of vertebrate species had been found and named. Since the mid-twentieth century the pace of discovery of new vertebrate species has been a fitful trickle (though lists of invertebrates grow ever longer). These cycles of collecting and naming vary a good deal from one group of animals to another, depending on their accessibility and interest to us. Those that are large, fierce, freakish, beautiful, edible, lovable, or dangerous were inventoried early on. These include birds, carnivores, primates, and large game. Inconspicuous or insignificant creatures, or those that do not appeal—because they are slimy, cold-blooded, annoying, nocturnal, or just very good at avoiding our notice—were not fully inventoried until the surveys of the late nineteeth and early twentieth century or even later. These groups include rodents, bats, insectivores, amphibians, and reptiles. Birds—those visible, audible, and beloved objects of watchers and collectors—were so well inventoried in the Linnaean and Humboldtian periods that the discoveries of the later survey phase show up as mere blips on a declining curve of discovery.12 (Fig. 1– 1.) In contrast, discoveries of mammalian species display the most pronounced cyclic pattern, with marked activity in the first two phases, but the most productive collecting in the survey period.13 (Fig. 1–1.) The pattern for North American mammals is even more pronounced, with discoveries more concentrated in the 1890s, and the earlier peak shifted from the 1830s and 1840s to the 1850s and 1860s. Different groups of mammals show some variation in this basic pattern. Most carnivore species were described in the eighteenth century, and most of the rest in the 1820s and 1830s—we humans have taken a keen interest in our closest competitors. Rodents, in contrast, were hardly known to Linnaean describers and not fully known to science until the age of survey, when it first became apparent just how prolific of species this group has been— it would appear that the Creator loves rodents as well as He does beetles. (Fig. 1–1.) Insectivores display the same strikingly lumpy pattern of discovery; as do also Chiroptera (bats), though with a stronger period of discovery in the mid-nineteenth century and a less striking peak in the early twentieth. Discoveries of North American reptiles and amphibians also display this periodicity, though less markedly: relatively few were described before 1800, most in the 1850s, with small peaks in the age of survey and after.14 (Data on world species of these groups is either absent or harder to tabulate.) These distinctive periods in the pace of collecting and describing suggest that the process of discovery was not random and individualistic, but that individual efforts were synchronized by larger cultural, economic, and social trends. This is not a novel thought. It is a commonplace (and doubtless true, as well) that early modern naturalists were inspired by the flood of new knowledge that was a by-product of the expanding global reach of European trade and conquest.15 And we now also know that Linnaean taxonomy grew out of the widespread interest in Enlightenment Europe in state-sponsored agricultural improvement, including schemes for acclimatizating exotic species to northern countries.16 It is also clear that the early-nineteenth-century flowering of collecting and naming resulted from the greater affordability of transoceanic steam travel and from European imperial expansion and settlement, especially in the rich tropical environments of the southern hemisphere.17 In North America, naturalists like John James Audubon followed the military frontier into the species-rich environments of the southeastern United States. And the western boundary and transport surveys of the 1850s took naturalists like Spencer Baird into the faunally diverse and virtually unworked areas of the American West.18 No one has tried to map the historical geography of taxonomic knowledge onto that of imperial expansion and settlement, but I would expect a close correlation. If trade has followed flags, so also have naturalists and collectors. Access was crucial: wherever improved transportation technology and colonial infrastructure afforded ready access to places previously expensive or dangerous to reach, there the pace of discovery of new species will soon pick up. The third of these cycles of collecting—I have without fanfare been calling it “survey” collecting—is the least well known and the most surprising. We do not think of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being a great age of discovery in natural history; but they were. One need only peruse the annual reports of national and civic museums to appreciate the enormous enthusiasm for expeditions and collecting. In the United States alone dozens or scores of collecting expeditions were dispatched each year to the far corners of the world between 1880 and 1930: hundreds in all, or thousands—perhaps as many as in the previous two hundred years of scientific expeditioning.19 They certainly produced as much knowledge of the world’s biodiversity as any of the earlier episodes of organized collecting. It was in the age of survey that scientists became fully aware of the world’s biodiversity. In places that were explored but not intensively worked, like the American West or much of South America, faunas and floras that had seemed closed books were reopened and vastly expanded. In its first two years of operation in the western states, the U.S. Biological Survey turned up seventy-one new vertebrate species—an abundance that some zoologists found hard to credit.20 Inventories of vertebrate animals became so complete that subsequent discoveries of new species became media events. Why, then, has this phase in the discovery of biodiversity remained the least well known? One reason is that collecting expeditions were mostly small and unpretentious, unlike the grand voyages of imperial exploration. Scientific collecting in the age of survey was accomplished mostly by small parties (three to half a dozen) whose purpose was to send back not exotica and accounts of heroic adventure and discovery, but rather crates of specimens. It is the dramatic explorations of the earlier periods that have caught the eye, because they were designed to catch the eye—of investors, princes, publishers, readers, chroniclers.21 It is no accident that the heroic voyaging of eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century explorers—Cook, Vancouver, Lape´rouse, Humboldt, Bougainville, Murchison—is well documented and remembered. Or that historians have dwelt on the feats of American explorers from Lewis and Clark to later ventures like the Harriman Alaska Expedition, or the adventures of polar explorers, rather than on the more numerous but less flashy modern discoverers of biodiversity.22 Still, this imbalance needs to be set right, and I hope this book will help do that. My version of this history is of necessity an exploration, not a survey, because the empirical foundations for a more comprehensive treatment have yet to be laid. I deal not at all with the earlier episodes of collecting and inventory, only with the survey period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor do I offer a global and comparative history of natural history surveys, but treat only those organized by American institutions. Many of these surveys took place within the United States and its North American neighbors, in part because state and national governments supported only surveys of their own political territories. Civic museums, however, did have a global reach, and I have made use of historical evidence from expeditions to South America and elsewhere, because the evidence is rich and pertinent. My subject is American natural history collectors and collections—not collections of American animals. Globalism and cross-cultural comparison are in vogue these days among historians, but these ideals should not deter us from studies of a particular time and place. Comparative methods are for subjects that have a well-developed history, which this one decidedly does not have. Besides, survey and collecting, even more than most scientific practices, are specific to particular natural and cultural environments. They can be properly understood only by intensive study in their particular contexts. For example, histories of Linnaean or Humboldtian collecting will necessarily focus on western Europe and its empires; here American work is the sideshow. Trans-cultural and transtemporal comparisons will be highly rewarding, but for now they are beyond our empirical reach. We have not yet entered a survey period in the history of natural history. Another limitation of this history is that it treats mainly vertebrate zoology and some botany, but insects and other invertebrates hardly at all. (The “all” creatures of the title should not be taken too literally.) This is not an arbitrary limitation: survey collecting in my period, especially by museums, concentrated on vertebrate animals, because scientific fieldwork piggybacked on collecting for exhibits of vertebrate animals. (Insects, plants, and mollusks did not have quite the same potential for eye-catching displays.) In addition, invertebrates are discouragingly numerous for comprehensive survey inventories, and they remained the province of amateur specialists long after vertebrate animals became the objects of organized survey. Invertebrates have recently become the object of systematic inventory, but in ways quite different from earlier surveys. Like any scientific (or any cultural) practice, natural history survey had its particular period and life cycle. It arose out of a particular set of environmental, cultural, and scientific circumstances; ran its course; then gave way to new and different ways of studying nature’s diversity. It was especially well developed in the United States, though not exclusively there. My aim is to describe what natural history survey was in its heyday, the reasons it flourished where it did, and how it worked in practice. Readers should approach what follows not as the last word on the subject, but as a reconnaissance. I hope it may inspire further study, and one day perhaps the full, comparative survey that the subject deserves. NATURAL HISTORY SURVEY But what exactly was natural history survey, and how did it differ from other, earlier modes of collecting? It was organized, systematic, and sustained, in contrast to sporadic individual efforts; at least, that was the ideal. In practice, natural history surveys varied widely. Some were little more than summer projects of college professors and their students, who set out to inventory the plants and animals of their state or region. The Nebraska Botanical Survey organized by Charles Bessey and Roscoe Pound was the best of this type, but there were many lesser ones. Other surveys were more public and institutionalized, like the U.S. Biological Survey founded by C. Hart Merriam, which was in animal biogeography what the U.S. Geological Survey was in topographical and geological mapping. Research museums like the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley or the University of Michigan’s museum undertook systematic survey collecting of a region or state. Finally, large civic museums like the American Museum of Natural History in New York or the Field Museum in Chicago organized systematic collecting of animals and plants not just in North America but in South and Central America, Oceania, and other parts of the world. But whether it was the private passion of one man or an official government project, and whether it lasted months or decades, natural history survey was organized, planned, and long-term. It aimed at a comprehensive, total inventory. Survey expeditions produced vast public collections, in the millions of specimens, all prepared and arranged according to standardized procedures (again, the ideal). It is useful to contrast survey with exploration, though the categories overlap. Explorers liked places little known to people of the West: places that were hard to reach and where the infrastructure of modern travel and communication did not yet extend. Exploration was an activity of world frontiers, where agricultural and commercial societies were pushing into regions of hunting-gathering or swidden farming. Often exploration was prologue to war, trade, or settlement, and voyages of exploration served mainly commercial, military, or political ends, and only incidentally scientific ones. Scientists attached to exploration parties were frequently guests and hangers-on, more tolerated than encouraged, and their collecting was catch-as-catch-can. Of course, we should not underrate the role of pure (or impure) curiosity: Europeans are a famously curious people and attracted to the exotic, and voyages of exploration were often voyages of discovery as well.23 But scientific discovery was more a by-product of exploration than its intended purpose. Survey collecting expeditions, in contrast, were primarily scientific ventures, dispatched to map and inventory the world’s flora and fauna. Although economic and nationalistic rationales were often deployed to get funding for surveys, their aim in practice was to gather facts about the earth and its natural history. The trend was toward science. In the United States, for example, the Mexican Boundary Survey and railway surveys of the 1850s were primarily military and political and only incidentally—though very productively—scientific. The great western surveys of the 1870s were officially economic and imperial but three of the four were led by naturalists pursuing knowledge of the region’s natural history. A decade later the U.S. Biological Survey began officially as a project in economic biology but soon became openly what it was always intended to be: an all-out faunal survey. Survey expeditions in their heyday were generally organized by universities or civic museums, and staffed by curators and biologists who could set itineraries and schedules to suit their own aims, not someone else’s. Whereas exploratory collecting was catch-as-catch-can, survey collecting was methodical and guided by scientific agendas. Whereas amateur and commercial collectors valued novelties most highly, survey collectors put equal value on full and exact knowledge of known and common species and on detailed mapping of the ranges of all the species within biogeographic regions. Explorations typically skimmed the cream of nature’s biodiversity; surveys were as thorough and complete as time and hard work could make them. Explorer-collectors were opportunists; survey collectors made plans and executed them as best they could. Most important, survey collecting was both extensive and intensive. Field parties surveyed whole regions but paused regularly at collecting sites or “stations,” where they worked intensively for days or weeks. And they returned repeatedly to a region until its biodiversity was thoroughly inventoried and its biogeography mapped in detail. Explorations, in contrast, were extensive but generally not intensive. Their itineraries marked out linear projections across territory for the purpose of reconnaissance, not complete inventory; they meant only to sample. Survey collecting also differed from the practices that later became the dominant mode of field biology from the mid-twentieth century. These practices were intensive but not extensive and addressed some particular theoretical issue (say, in population genetics or ecosystem ecology) rather than making an inventory. It was the combination of both extensive coverage and intensive local work that gave natural history survey its distinctive character. It was a transitional, mixed practice, combining the extensive element of exploration with the intensive features of modern, empirical science. This combination of extensive and intensive practices is a point on which much will hang. I want to say that natural history survey was an “exact science” but cannot, because that term has come to refer more narrowly to the sciences that can be reduced to mathematics, like mechanics or astronomy. So I can only say that natural history survey employed exact methods, and that it was an “exacting” science. The word gets the idea across without claiming too much: survey was methodical, systematic, and disciplined. Although the term “exacting science” is not an actors’ category, it is not an anachronism either. The terms “exact” and “exact method” were widely applied to all the empirical sciences in my period, including sciences of the field, and exactness seems to have been understood as the hallmark of modern science. Exploration and survey were also carried on in different kinds of places. Although unexplored regions were tempting to survey collectors, because they were likely to harbor undiscovered species, most expeditions were dispatched to places that were already known and partly settled by Europeans; places that were still wild but also accessible. It is one thing for explorers to transit uninhabited or hostile territory, but quite another for field parties to carry out intensive survey collecting beyond the infrastructure of settled society.24 The logistics of receiving regular shipments of supplies and returning bulky shipments of specimens kept collecting parties close to railroad and telegraph nets. If exploration was an activity of frontiers, biological survey was distinctly one of “inner frontiers”—a concept I will explain shortly. Survey and exploration also gave participants different experiences of place. Explorers were always just passing through; survey collectors lingered and revisited. Explorers treasured the exotic; survey teams aspired to make places familiar, to know them as well as if they lived there (though they could never quite do that). Survey collecting lost none of its cultural worth, as exploration did, by being carried on in semidomesticated places, because adventure was not one of its purposes, as it was of exploration. It was the display of courage and resourcefullness that gave authenticity to explorers’ efforts to know the world. For survey naturalists it was the other way around: if a survey turned into an adventure, it was a sign that something had gone wrong in its planning or performance. Survey knowledge was local or “residential” knowledge made systematic and scientific. Finally, survey collecting was carried on in a particular scientific context. It was a practice of the downward slope of the discovery curve—recall the graphs of the rates of species discovery. It was collecting in a situation where many or even most species were already known and described. It was not filling in the very last gaps (which requires more serendipity than system), but making maps and inventories essentially complete—say, 90 percent. Survey collecting was a mode of fieldwork suited to a situation in which a complete inventory was a realistic aim, but where the species remaining to be discovered and described were not excessively rare. That is one reason why survey collecting was both intensive and extensive: for complete stocktaking, collectors could leave no corner unexamined and no stone unturned. Collecting in other periods was quite different: for the Linnaeans it was often a matter of mining existing collections and texts. All those known species ready for proper scientific names and pigeon holes—it was hardly essential to go afield at all (though many naturalists did, or ran networks of local collectors). Collecting on the upward trend of discovery, in a Humboldtian mode, required fieldwork but was more extensive than intensive. In places newly opened to naturalists, collectors did not have to be systematic and exacting to reap rich rewards of new species. Opportunistic cream-skimming—collecting whatever was most easily collected—was more cost effective than trying to get every last, hard-to-get species. (Much collecting in this period was done by commercial collectors, for whom time was money.) And after the survey period, when inventories of species were substantially complete, collecting tended to be intensive, local, and focused on solving some particular problem—“project” collecting, we might call it. When only a few percent of species remained to be collected and described, the rewards hardly justified full-scale survey. Natural history survey was poised between cream skimming and gleaning. Earlier it was not necessary; later it did not pay. Little has been done to classify and compare different kinds of collecting practice, but one thing is sure: that they will differ depending on the degree to which inventories are already complete. Collecting is not one activity but a diverse family of practices—and a subject ripe for historical survey. Why did natural history flourish when it did in North America and elsewhere? What kind of society would invest in comprehensive collecting and inventory, and what kind of scientists invested careers in survey fieldwork? How were expeditions justified and financed, and how did they operate in the field? These are the themes of the story I want to tell, and it turns out to be a more complex story than one might imagine. To tell it requires a mix of historical genres: environmental history of “inner frontiers,” to begin with; then a social history of nature-going; and some cultural history of artistic representations of nature. Institutional history is also required: of the museums that organized collecting expeditions, and of the patrons who paid for them, and of changes in curators’ professional role that allowed them to go afield as collectors. Methods of science studies and history of science are required to deal with field practices, and methods of intellectual history to explain how taxonomic categories changed with collecting practices. The practices of survey collecting depended on a whole set of environmental and social conditions. One was a continent (North America) and a world that had only recently been knit together by cheap and rapid steam transport, making nature physically accessible. Another was a culture whose interest in nature was becoming more naturalistic than sentimental, and that made survey science seem familiar and (so to speak) natural. Third, scientific institutions evolved (universities, museums, government agencies) that supported field collecting that was both far-ranging and exact. And finally there was a taxonomic science that for the first time had data that were more or less complete and could turn new facts from the field reliably into scientific discoveries and careers. The practices of survey science were specific to these circumstances, as those of Enlightenment and Victorian natural history were to the institutions, cultures, and events of European exploration and expansion. None of these elements—an abundant nature, the cultural incentives to scientific study, and institutional rewards for discovery—by itself accounts for the popularity of natural history survey: but taken together, they do. That in a nutshell is the message of this book. As history, natural history survey is doubtless a harder sell than either exploration or experimental field science. On the one side it lacks the romantic appeal of exploration, with its grand voyages, its cast of flamboyant, self-fashioning characters, and its aura of heroism and imperial power. On the other side, survey lacks (or seems to lack) the grand theories and exact experimental methods that we now accept as exemplary of modern science. Few survey naturalists and collectors have brand-name recognition, and many are obscure figures who passed inconspicuously across the stage of history. The creatures that fired their interest were likewise often rather unromantic: weedy plants, lizards and snakes, small nocturnal rodents that few of us could find even if we wanted to and could not tell one from another if we did. We associate survey work with “mere” collecting, observing, record keeping, and pigeonholing: practices often taken to be a lower kind of science— what scientists do before they are able to do proper experiments or theoretical modeling. Yet it is these very qualities that make natural history survey a particularly rewarding historical subject. Its varied cast of characters, its intimate relation with the culture of vacationing and outdoor recreation, its combination of high science and craft practices, the ambiguous careers and scientific identity of its practitioners— all pique historical interest. Besides, as the distant descendents of Adam and Eve, the first people to survey and name, we should know how we have become acquainted with our fellow passengers on our biodiverse celestial ark. Let us begin then with nature: the ambiguous, liminal nature of the inner frontiers. In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared that the frontier of Euro-American settlement had become history. He took his cue from the U.S. Census Bureau, which in 1890 announced that the westward-moving frontier of settlement was so broken up by scattered pockets of settlement that it was no longer a line at all. The frontier had ceased to be a significant feature of North America’s human geography.25 With the end of the Indian wars in the 1870s, no part of North America except the taiga and the polar north was occupied by migratory hunter-gatherer societies. Every part of the American West was inhabited by Euro-American agriculturalists: the Hispano-American settlements of the Southwest; the expanding homesteading areas of the high plains; the Mormon irrigation settlements in the Great Basin; the coast and valley farms and orchards of Oregon and California; the mining and logging camps of the western mountains.26 Farther east, older settled areas of New England and Appalachia were being unsettled, as hill farmers sold up and moved west to homestead. The North American landscape was becoming a mosaic of intermingled settled and uninhabited areas—a continent not of one linear frontier but of varied inner frontiers. Historians ever since Turner wrote his famous essay have been much excercised over the significance of the “closing” of the free-land frontier—in modern terms, the displacement of mobile hunter-gatherer societies by intensive agricultural ones. Although Turner’s views of the formative influence of the frontier on American society and politics have long been discarded, his ghost still haunts American history. Environmental historians still begin with Turner, if only to signal that they are untainted with the academic heresy of geographical “determinism.”27 But perhaps Turner’s ghost is hard to exorcise because he was on to something. How people settle, inhabit, and experience places does profoundly shape their culture and politics.28 The human geography of America did change in fundamental ways a century ago, with the transition from a two-zone to a mosaic landscape. However, it was not the end of geographical influence, as Turner believed, but a transition from one kind of geographical influence to another: from the sharp gradient of a settlement frontier to the shaded gradients and ambiguous landscapes of inner frontiers. The experience of these inner frontiers was crucial to Americans’ evolving conceptions of nature and culture, I believe—and also to field naturalists’ changing ideas and practices. Here is the argument. For a period of some four or five decades, from the 1870s to the 1920s, the landscape of North America afforded an unusual intimacy between settled and natural areas. Densely inhabited and wild areas were jumbled together. Areas of relatively undisturbed nature, with much of its original flora and fauna intact (except for large game animals and predators), were accessible to people who lived in towns and cities, with their cultural and educational institutions. It was this combination of wildness and accessibility that defined the inner frontiers. No longer were densely settled and cultivated landscapes separated from relatively unsettled ones by a demographic and cultural line, as had been the case for more than two centuries. Nor was the landscape—yet—so extensively occupied that natural areas were reduced to small relicts and artificially preserved parks and refuges, as was increasingly the case in much of North America after the mid-twentieth century. To experience nature in the inner frontiers one did not cross a line where the infrastructure of settled society stopped and travel became suddenly much slower, more expensive, and hazardous. Nor was it—yet—a problem for biologists to discover places to study nature au naturel, rather than as isolated and degraded preserves. In the intermingled landscapes of the inner frontiers, the boundaries between wild and settled were unusually extensive and permeable. Opportunities for working and knowing nature and rethinking its cultural meanings were unusually rich, especially in natural science but also in other outdoor pursuits, like hunting and camping. Some of the best evidence of what life was like in the inner frontiers comes from popular sport and recreational magazines, and naturalists’ reports. What made the inner frontiers so extensive in this period was the inflationary way that the western half of America was settled after the end of the Civil War. This was the age of railroad booms and homestead and timber acts, which constituted one of the greatest giveaways of state lands in modern history. It was comparable in scale to the medieval forest clearances in Central Europe, and much faster. The politics of sectionalism and manifest destiny; the expansive dynamism of an intercontinental market economy; and a commercial culture that put the highest value on owning property and turning natural resources as quickly as possible into money—these elements combined to produce a period of rapid, unregulated, and ragged settlement and cycles of land exploitation and abandonment.29 The historical geographer Carville Earle has argued that American frontier expansion was always cyclical, with periods of inflationary geographical expansion alternating with periods of relative stability. These cycles of restlessness and land speculation were driven by macroeconomic business cycles, Earle argues, and came to an end in the 1840s, when population growth in the most densely settled areas outstripped that in newly opened frontier areas.30 However, the expansion of the late nineteenth century in the West appears to be another of these inflationary pulses—it was simply the first to take place in an urbanizing world.31 Earle’s schema seems quite consistent with the concept of inner frontiers. It was not population pressure in eastern urban areas that drove the inflationary westward-driving phase of settlement, but economic and cultural forces: nationalist zeal and the quest for quick speculative profits. The social machinery of rectangular survey and wholesale land grants to states, railroads, projectors, and homesteaders were designed to encourage rapid occupation.32 This period of inflationary settlement was characterized by homestead bubbles in marginal dry lands, boom-and-bust mining and timbering, and a transportation infrastructure built out well in advance of economic or demographic demand. Some areas were settled too rapidly, while others were too hastily abandoned. The result was a mosaic landscape of dense settlement mingling with lightly occupied or abandoned areas. Some of these inner frontiers were places unsuited to intensive human uses—too dry, too wet, too sandy, too rugged. The Lake Michigan dune area east of Chicago was such a place—a lightly inhabited island left behind in a sea of cornfields and expanding suburbs.33 The sand region of central Illinois was another such place. Here a tributary of the Illinois River had piled up a large inner delta of sandy glacial outwash, which was too dry and infertile for cornbelt farming, and too forbidding (with local names like “Devil’s Neck” and “Devil’s Hole”) even for the vacationers and nature worshipers who flocked to the lakeshore dunes. Such areas remained inner frontiers in the middle of one of the most intensively cultivated regions in the world.34 Farther west on the semiarid high plains were the large badland areas of the Dakotas and other places, bizarrely etched and rapidly eroding areas in which few plants can grow and/or humans live—wild islands in a sea of productive ranchland. Farther east there were the sandy pine barrens of southern New Jersey, a mazy wilderness in an area of intensive truck farming, where outsiders were almost certain to lose their way.35 Another island of nature in the agricultural heartland was the so-called driftless area centered in southwest Wisconsin. Once an island between two lobes of the continental ice sheet, this area is a preglacial landscape of wooded ridges and valleys. Less fertile than the sheets of glacial till that surround it and too hilly for machine agriculture, this area remained a refuge for plants and animals, as it was surrounded by a rising sea of agriculture—a kind of human glaciation.36 The cold and rugged uplands of the Adirondack and Catskill mountains likewise remained islands of wild and semiwild country—tourist islands, eventually—in a landscape webbed by towns, canals, and railroads.37 Actual islands are relatively rare in the interior of North America, but they too can afford protection against human change. Isle Royale in Lake Superior, for example, was protected by its isolation and rugged terrain from clear-cut logging and the spectacular fires that scorched the northern cut-overs. The copper-mining boom of the 1840s was short-lived and relatively undestructive; and relicts of mining and lake shipping, plus a growing tourist industry, provided access and ready-made facilities for visiting naturalists.38 Great swamps like Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp, or the Everglades and Okefenokee in Florida, or much of the Gulf coast constituted another kind of inner frontier: islands of wild and inaccessible nature close to coastal cities.39 These were created when rising postglacial sea levels flooded estuaries and low peninsulas. But the greatest areas of marsh and swamp were in the glaciated regions of the upper Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes, where they covered much of northern Indiana, northeast Ohio, southeast Michigan, and parts of northeast Illinois. This vast wetland was created in the most recent advance and retreat of the Laurentide ice sheets, which bulldozed established drainage systems, then covered them with moraines and layers of till. Stream and river systems were slow to reform because in this flattened terrain back-cutting erosion was very slow. Differences of just a few feet of elevation could send waters to the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. Bypassed in the early westward migrations, these wetlands remained largely intact in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Likewise the glaciated regions of northern Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, with their marshy sloughs and countless prairie pothole ponds. Much of northern Minnesota, with its thousands of interconnected lakes, is a low indefinite watershed—three, in fact: north to Hudson Bay, east to Lake Superior, and south to the Mississippi. These coastal and interior wetlands were potentially rich agricultural areas, but expensive to drain; in effect, humans had to do in a few decades what it took nature ten or twenty millennia to achieve. There may originally have been 125 million acres of swamp and seasonally flooded land in the United States—an area the size of France—of which an estimated 80 million acres remained undrained in 1915.40 Some had simply been bypassed for more accessible land farther west; in others, speculators “preempted” huge tracts and set them aside unused for decades until rising land prices made drainage projects economical. Thanks to the quirks of American land and tax laws, large areas were not drained and plowed until the 1910s; meanwhile they remained pockets of undisturbed nature teeming with wildlife—a vast inner frontier to entice naturalists and collectors. In the Central Valley of California in the 1910s, where large-scale reclamation projects were rapidly transforming delta and desert into irrigated monoculture, Joseph Grinnell could still find patches and strips of “waste” land that harbored their original rosters of small mammals.41 In the lake and swamp district of northern Indiana, despite decades of draining and road building, the zoologist Carl Eigenmann could still report in 1895 that the whole region “gives one the impression that it has changed but little since the ice left it.” It was hardly pristine: dams and ditches had turned swamps into ponds and streams; but enough was left to attract sportsmen and naturalists.42 The Huron River valley in southeastern Michigan, with its kettle ponds, moraines, bogs, and swamps, was an outdoor ecological preserve for biologists at the University of Michigan, and just minutes away by urban trolley.43 The largest remaining areas of wetland in 1920 were in the Southeast and Gulf Coast states, especially Florida; but significant portions of the marshes of the North Central states still survived, though the more accessible parts in Ohio and Indiana had been drained.44 A map of active drainage projects circa 1920 vividly reveals both the vast size of the original wetlands and the monumental efforts that were made in the 1910s to turn these inner frontiers into productive agricultural landscapes.45 Large river floodplains were also extensive inner frontiers before reclamation enclosed and destroyed them in the 1910s and 1920s. The Mississippi Valley was one of the great flyways of North America, providing continuous and relatively undisturbed habitat for animals and huge flocks of migrating birds. The Illinois River, before it was leveed in the 1910s, was an important commercial fishery and a popular center for sport fishing and fowling, just a few hours train ride from Chicago. Its floodplain forests had been timbered but only selectively, leaving much intact, and floodplain fields produced alternating crops of fish and corn as they flooded and dried out in an annual cycle.46 River towns with a well-developed infrastructure of boat building and repair gave sportsmen and collectors ready access to a wilderness of sloughs, swamps, and oxbow and fluctuating lakes—an inner frontier. So did other major deltas and floodplains, for example, the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in California, where in 1918 the mammalogist Joseph Grinnell worked “the frontiers of reclamation” and tried to stay one step ahead of the dredgers and dikers.47 The roster of inner frontiers could be extended: for example, to the deserts of the Southwest and Southern California; the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau; and the caprock canyons of west Texas, where southern and northern faunas mingled.48 The well-watered mountain massifs rising like islands out of southwestern deserts remained, because of their desert isolation, remote and untouched even as large cities grew nearby. The San Francisco Mountains of Arizona, for example, were a popular resort for naturalists decades before becoming a tourist mecca. Scouting Arizona’s deserts for a site for a field station in 1903, botanists Daniel Mac-Dougal and Frederick Coville were attracted to these peaks: “charming situations in the mountains of the desert, remote from civilization, rich and remarkable in their flora, furnished with an abundance of pure, never-failing water, and altogether delightful in their surroundings . . . treasure spots for the camping naturalist.” (They settled for a more accessible and convenient site on the outskirts of Tucson.)49 The Panamint and other mountains arising out of the California deserts were similar places, and the rugged high country of the Sierra Nevada and Rocky mountains remained quite wild, yet accessible to visitors via old trails and stage roads. Farther north, dense coastal rain forests were more forbidding islands of nature (some interior parts of the Olympic Mountains and Vancouver Island were virtually impassible), but at the heart of an urbanizing region. The deciduous forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains were another inner frontier, preserved in part by the rugged, unglaciated terrain, and in part by local land-use customs. Hardscrabble hill farmers occupied mainly the bottom lands of valleys and their lower slopes, using the wooded mountain slopes lightly for foraging pigs and livestock, hunting, and selective timbering, and for operating illegal moonshine stills. The result was a forest area lightly inhabited and used, but well supplied with trails. Residents notorious for their suspicion of outsiders further increased the region’s isolation. It was biotically very rich—for a million years and some seventeen ice ages it had been a refuge for northern species forced south by cold—yet remained incompletely known into the 1920s and 1930s.50 An inventory of remnant old-growth forests in 1920 showed substantial areas in the Pacific Northwest and western Montana; in coastal Florida, especially the panhandle; and in the lower Mississippi River Valley. Smaller areas remained in the mountains of central Appalachia, in Northern Michigan and Minnesota, and in the mountains of the Northwest. Eastern old-growth forests were mere vestiges of the vast forests that covered much of the region in 1850, but in places like the Adirondacks or White Mountains they constituted islands of wild nature in a largely humanized landscape.51 Other inner frontiers were created by quirks of capitalist economics and landholding laws that gave access to wild places without (for a time) completely transforming them. There was no more powerful force creating inner frontiers than railroads and interurban trolleys. The peculiar economics of the highly capital-intensive railroads made it rational for railroad companies to build lines into areas well before there were any people there to use them. It was better to lay down track and take losses up front than to leave potentially profitable areas open to competing roads. This “logic of capital,” as William Cronon has termed it, was especially marked in the roads fanning out into the western prairies from Chicago. The western transcontinental railroads, which became vast landholders as a result of huge grants of public land, also became powerful promoters of rapid settlement in the agriculturally marginal areas of the prairie-plains transition. To stimulate settlement—or to simulate it—railroads plopped down standardized “towns” at regular intervals, hoping that they would become centers for the collection of freight, and built dense networks of feeder lines across thinly settled countryside.52 This premature infrastructure gave people from cities and towns easy access to areas that had very recently been reachable only by stage-coach or on horseback and were still relatively wild, but now just hours away from cities to the east and west. In 1887, for example, a local botanist in Hastings, in south-central Nebraska, found a stretch of original prairie just five miles from town, where the only signs of human presence were an old wagon track and abandoned sod huts. This biotic island was created by the hop-skip geography of prairie settlement. The earliest settlers took homestead claims in the Platte River valley, believing that to be the best land (because it was wooded); the second wave, arriving on the transcontinental railroad, settled along the rail line, where land was cheap and well advertised. In between river and railroad, strips of untouched prairie remained within a few miles of a city of twelve thousand.53 A similar process played out in the regions of boom-and-bust logging and mining. In the pineries of the upper Great Lakes, which were cut from the early 1870s to the mid-1890s, networks of local railroads built to haul out lumber remained in place when the pines were gone and the loggers moved on, to haul in sportsmen and naturalists.54 Here too railroads were active promoters of settlement and of the recreational industry that replaced logging as an economic mainstay after the pineries were stripped. Natural areas that just a few years before had been accessible only by logging parties or sportsmen with Indian guides could be reached comfortably in less than a day and at reasonable cost from urban centers. And as the outer fringes of the railroad frontier pushed into ever more remote areas of North America, naturalists were never far behind. When a line was built in 1931 to the edge of the arctic tundra at Churchill, on Hudson Bay, parties of naturalists arrived soon after, to see a biome that until then would have required a full-fledged expedition to visit.55 Railroads encouraged tourists and naturalists by offering cheap excursion fares, building hotels and roads in prime recreational areas, lobbying for national and state parks, and providing information on transportation and lodging in tourist regions.56 They also on occasion provided information to amateur and commercial collectors, publishing lists of rare plants and directions to find them—much to the dismay of botanists, who often found only the holes where rare species had been dug out.57 Areas of logging, mining, and commercial fishing remained suprisingly natural even as they were cut down, dug up, and fished out. The archaeologist Harlan Smith recalled his boyhood summers at Bay Port, Michigan, on the western shore of Lake Huron in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when extractivelogging and fishing were in full swing. The signs of human depredation were everywhere: “The beach was strewn with drift wood from the mills perhaps ten feet wide and continuous. The heads of dead sturgeon were so close together on the beach that you were seldom out of smelling distance.” Yet the wildlife was abundant—turtles, snakes, even bears. The real change came when the place became a summer resort. Revisiting the place in 1910, Smith found it, in effect, gone: “the country had so completely changed in appearance and was so much fenced up that it simply made me sick,” he recalled. The beach was so built up that he could not land a boat.58 The initial assaults of loggers and commercial fishers had created a landscape that was nothing like the aboriginal landscape of Indian hunter-gatherers; but it was still biodiverse and could recover quickly in a natural succession. After all, die-offs and clearances by fires and blights are natural occurences. Suburbs are not. The history of the Illinois River illustrates the same point. In 1900 the City of Chicago opened the Chicago Drainage Canal, which redirected the city’s raw sewage away from Lake Michigan and into the upper reaches of the Illinois River, down which a putrid tide oozed slowly south to the Mississippi. Although the initial impact of this assault damaged river wildlife, a decade later an ecological survey showed that the river had largely recovered. Indeed, the influx of nutrients seemed to have increased the river’s fish populations. The greater danger, the ecologist Stephen Forbes warned, was the headlong draining and leveeing of the river’s floodplain (from 6,700 acres in 1899 to 124,205 acres in 1914) that was already destroying the rich river fisheries by draining seasonal breeding grounds and turning the river into a barren and unhealthful drainage ditch.59 Boom-and-bust exploitation of natural resources created the inner frontiers; permanent settlement and landscape engineering brought their era to a close. Closer to town, access to rural countryside was also eased by the massive building of suburban and interurban electric trolleys from the 1870s on. Here too the logic of capital prevailed, as trolley companies extended their routes into the deep countryside well before there were large numbers of suburbanites there to ride them into town. It was cheaper to lay down track and run cars where no one yet lived than to buy out competitors later. Companies also banked on the fact that cheap transport would draw commuters to their catchment areas and eventually give them a profitable monopoly—which it did. The result was an inflationary expansion of suburban zones. By 1870 cities were surrounded by suburban fringes fourteen times the size of the inner walking city. By 1900 this zone had doubled again in area and extended five to fifteen miles out. This process was further accelerated between the wars by the advent of the family automobile and paved roads.60 Eventually, of course, exurban fringes became suburbs, and suburbs became city neighborhoods, obliterating the natural environments that had attracted people to the fringes in the first place. But for a brief period the logic of capital gave town and city dwellers ready access to what was still deep countryside. In just a few hours on interurban trolleys, city dwellers could ride to collecting areas that previously could be reached only laboriously by horse and carriage on unimproved roads. The “twilight zone between town and country,” as the ecologist Frederic Clements once called it, was a good place to find vestiges of presettlement floras—sometimes the only place. In corn or wheat belts, mechanized agriculture had so thoroughly destroyed the original savanna and prairie vegetation that suburbs and vacant lots were the last refugia of the region’s native plants. The ecologist Arthur Vestal was amazed to find a patch of original California prairie in the vacant lot just a few doors from his home in Stanford.61 Twilight zones were hardly picturesque, to be sure, but they afforded an “intriguing” experience of nature as both wild and humanized.62 The nature writer John Burroughs, who worked as a government clerk in Washington in the 1860s and early 1870s, found the city and its environs a naturalist’s paradise. Unlike northern commercial cities, the capital city had not yet sprawled, “and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places crosses it.”63 Diverse species of birds inhabited the grounds of the government buildings, and the ravines of Rock Creek, between Washington and Georgetown, were semiwild areas full of wildlife. “There is, perhaps, not another city in the Union that has on its very threshold so much natural beauty and grandeur, such as men seek for in remote forests and mountains,” Burroughs rhapsodized. “There are passages . . . as wild and savage, and apparently as remote from civilization, as anything one meets with in the mountain sources of the Hudson or the Delaware.”64 In the mid-1880s the ornithologist Frank Chapman pursued his avocation while commuting to a job as a bank clerk in New York City; his commuter stop was right in the middle of one of the best birding areas in the region, at least in migration seasons. The experience was as interesting and exciting as any in his subsequent career.65 Naturalists were delighted when the American Association for the Advancement of Science decided to hold its 1886 meeting in New York City, because of the “wealth of attractive places for collecting near at hand,” especially in the “New Jersey collecting grounds.” A decade later the biologist Henry Linville found abundant animal life for his students in the Fort Lee Woods, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and in the wilds of Staten Island.66 Hard to believe now, winding in heavy traffic through the endless subdivisions, but so it was, and not all that long ago. And in Chicago too: the city made by railroads and the paradigm of rapid urban sprawl.67 In the early 1900s an ornithologist friend of Joseph Grinnell’s, Frank S. Daggett, found excellent bird collecting in the suburbs and surrounding country, a few hours away by trolley. Or he would take a train thirty or forty miles out and float back to town down the Des Plaines River in his folding boat, observing and collecting. In the migration season Daggett did not have to go farther than the local city parks, so abundant was the bird life. “These are great migration times here nowadays,” Daggett wrote Grinnell in spring 1904, “the parks are loaded with birds . . . and people shooting them with opera glasses.”68 Harry Swarth, another Grinnell prote´ge´, who worked at the Field Museum, would leave his house at about nine, ride an hour and a half on the street car, and return by four-thirty with twenty-five birds or more. Fox Lake, which was a few hours away by railroad, was a center of sport hunting and also a fine place to collect small mammals; the woods were full of shrews, mice, chipmunks, and gophers. Swarth spent three months collecting on the estate of the museum’s president just forty miles south of the city.69 In the early nineteen-teens collectors found rare animals and even new species in the Sacramento delta, not too far from San Francisco. And Joseph Grinnell collected successfully on the fringes of Central Valley towns—so long as he stayed outside the patrolling range of resident cats.70 Florida at the turn of the century was a naturalist’s and collector’s paradise—a vast island of almost untouched nature readily accessible from major towns. Here is Frank Chapman’s description of a farmstead where he collected, just five miles from downtown Gainesville: It is a beautiful place, surrounded by ground of almost every character, pines, scrub-oak, low hummocks, and the old clearings, and is thus an excellent place in which to trap. There is probably no wilder region in the vicinity.... [H]ere the family have their home, a magnificent large log house, and a mile further on, their orange grove, the finest in this region.71 Not all inner frontiers were unintended. National forests were set aside for future use or recreation. Amounting to just a few million acres in 1890, mostly in the Sierra Nevada and Cascades, national forests expanded by 1910 to some 200 million acres, mostly in the western mountains. A further 40 million were reserved in the northern Great Lakes, Ozarks, central Appalachians, and New England.72 In these eastern regions underused or abandoned areas reverted to public ownership through default and purchase. The Adirondack National Park was created in this way in a region still partly forested and wild, and the Green Mountain National Forest (in the late 1920s and 1930s) in a state that just a generation earlier had been largely open land.73 In effect a national commons, national parks and forests were generally accessible (eastern forests were laced with walking trails), but off the beaten tracks they remained quite wild.74 Private game parks were another kind of nature preserve, numbering at least 500 in 1910 and some as large as 60,000 acres, though not always accessible to scientific collectors.75 Rural cemeteries and school yards were other places where vestiges of nature could be found, as were Indian reservations, if they were not overgrazed. Also railroad rights-of-way, because they were fenced and regularly burned, as the original prairies had been by Indian firing, but with coal-fired locomotives now providing the sparks. Town parks and unkempt rural roadsides were other refugia in the exurban “twilight zone.” Roadsides were ready made for ecological survey transects.76 Such vestigial bits of nature might seem poor places for systematic collecting, but for a few decades there were enough of them around rural towns to serve the purpose. In 1916 a group of ecologists selected Charleston, Illinois, for the site of a survey of invertebrate fauna and found all they wanted in railroad rights of way, an old-growth woodlot (clear-cut just a few years later), and bluff and floodplain forest.77 Of course, these vestiges of nature were a vanishing resource. Exurban frontiers were relentlessly on the move, engulfing fields and filling in vacant lots. But between 1880 and World War I this twilight zone was a prominent feature of America’s inner frontiers. The opening up of underpriced farmland in the West also created inner frontiers by drawing population from settled areas farther east. Watching suburbs engulfing farms and forests has made us unused to thinking of abandonment and depopulation as common events in history (except in inner cities); but they are a recurring feature of the periodic waves of aboriginal dispossession and westward movement. For example, this cycle played out in South Carolina in the 1820s and 1830s, as leading planter families moved west en masse to newly opened lands in Georgia and Alabama.78 Nor was abandonment a phenomenon only of places people left. Settlers in frontier areas often bought land that was poor for farming because it was cheap, and because in the feeding frenzy of land rushes they wrongly assumed that the price of any land must rise, and then learned the truth the hard way. So in many areas settlement and abandonment were concurrent processes.79 The late nineteenth century was another time of mass migration and abandonment, driven this time by western homesteading after the end of the Plains Indian wars. Homesteading had long been the favored way to get public lands into private hands quickly. It had always been speculative and volatile, making large tracts of land available at prices well below their actual value, spreading the virus of land fever. And as homesteading expanded into the western prairies and semiarid plains, it stimulated a large-scale abandonment of the poorer agricultural regions of the Northeast. New England (though never depopulated) was the region where wholesale abandonment was most marked, from the 1870s or even earlier. The original settlers of interior New England had preferred to situate their farms on hills than in river valleys, owing to the easier transport on high ground. But as the thin upland soils gave out, people moved into valley towns, leaving the hillsides to revert to woodland. Then as cheap land beckoned in the west, farmers moved out altogether. The state of Vermont, once wholly cleared, reverted to forest within a matter of decades.80 A study of farm abandonment in New York State in the 1920s showed that the acreage of farmland in 1924 was just 81 percent of what it had been in 1880; and the pace of abandonment was accelerating (60,000 acres per year between 1880 and 1910; 140,000 in the 1910s; and 270,000 in 1920–25). Near cities, farms became suburbs, but in the Catskill and Adirondack mountain areas and the hilly country of south-central New York they became forest.81 A Depression-era survey reckoned that 2.3 million acres of cleared land reverted to forest or was suburbanized in New England between 1880 and 1910, plus 0.77 million in the Mid-Atlantic states. Another 13 million acres were abandoned by 1930. The greatest percentage declines in cleared land were in New England and New York, eastern Michigan, eastern Virginia, and the interior Southeast.82 The shift from wheat to dairy farming, first in New England and New York, then in Wisconsin, produced a mosaic landscape of pasture and second-growth forest.83 A few decades later massive abandonment also occurred in the western plains, as the homestead frontier pushed into the semiarid zone west of the hundredth meridian, where cultivation gave way to ranching. In this climatically volatile region, a thirty-year cycle of wet and drought first lured farmers into marginal areas, then drove them out. One such cycle coincided with the inflationary phase of homesteading in the 1880s; another produced the great plow-up of the southern plains in the 1920s and the subsequent dust-bowl out-migration. Another is presently under way in the northern high plains.84 Traveling the American west in 1913 on an ecological survey, Frederic Clements counted hundreds of abandoned farms—“dead homes”—and ghost towns in central Oregon, southern Idaho, and South Dakota. Areas a hundred miles across were almost entirely depopulated, and it was even worse in the southern plains. (The “live homes” were even more distressing than the dead ones, Clements felt: bare one-room shacks in bleak and hopeless situations.)85 Cheap-land frontiers thus became inner frontiers: object lessons in human hubris and favored sites for natural history surveys. The same pattern of settlement and abandonment occurred in logging and mining areas in the forests of New England, the upper Great Lakes, and the Rocky Mountains, as well as in river fisheries. It was not homesteading that drove the boom-and-bust cycles of resource use, but the legal system that sold rights to cut or mine public land for a pittance. Boom-and-bust harvesting of resources reached a crescendo after the Civil War, when market competition caused loggers, miners, and fishermen to treat natural resources as placer deposits, to use or lose, rather than as bases for sustainable livelihoods. The western public lands resulted from the way that the United States had grown politically, by huge purchases or expropriations; and Americans’ devotion to states’ rights and laissezfaire political economy made these lands a virtually unregulated commons. The result, as is usual where there is no customary system of usufruct rights and mutual obligations, was a commons tragedy.86 Clear-cut logging and abandonment from the Great Lakes pineries to the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest; mining booms and busts in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada; fishery cycles of bonanza and collapse in the Sacramento and Columbia rivers— all left behind stump lands and depleted soils, ghost towns and valleys choked with mining debris, and half-emptied and impoverished coastal villages.87 Logging and mining towns were built and briefly inhabited by people who came not to stay and make a life, but to make their fortunes as quickly as possible and leave. Marginal homesteads were occupied by farmers who expected to “improve” the land, sell at a profit, and move on within a few years. The extractive industries of the late nineteenth century (including tillage agriculture) depended on resources that had accumulated over centuries and millennia and afforded once-only chances to make a financial killing. Placer gold deposts are the classic example, but it is equally true of white pine forests, loess soils, and mountain forests, which follow (respectively) large fires, melting continental ice sheets, and rains of volcanic ash. Tillable high plains are likewise a temporary gift of recurring climate cycles. Americans’ boom-and-bust practices of settlement and land use thus produced a patchwork landscape of densely and lightly settled areas. Whether skipped over, newly settled, or recently abandoned, these inner frontiers were served by a transportation infrastructure more than adequate to the needs of recreationers and visiting naturalists. In such places, town dwellers could experience nature without setting aside urban perceptions. And out of this meeting of culture and nature came new conceptions of their relation. Only rarely has so much semiwild nature been so accessible as between 1870 and 1920; nor is it likely to recur, barring some catastrophic change in global climate or the natural history of human epidemic diseases. As the cheap-land frontier shaped American culture before 1870, so too did the inner frontiers of the 1880s to 1920s, in ways we are only beginning to understand. What was it like to visit the inner frontiers? What did they look and feel like? Ecological journals are full of photographs of such places; but photographs, especially those made artlessly as a scientific record, quite fail to evoke the experience of places so far from town culture yet so near. To capture the meaning of such liminal places, literary documents—word pictures—are more evocative and revealing. For example, the stories told by hunters and fishermen in sporting journals offer vivid glimpses of what life was like along the railroads that were pushing into the northern plains and north woods in the 1870s and 1880s. Sportsmen were among the first urbanites to take these lines into the inner frontiers, and they possessed literary genres—the fish story and sporting travelogue—designed to evoke their experiences for armchair readers. Sportsmen are famous for stretching the truth, and the credibility of their exploits depended on their ability to give detailed and vivid evocations of natural places and phenomena (more on that in chapter 2). So they make engaging witnesses. In 1877 the angler-writer “Will O’ the Wisp” reported on a trip on the Wisconsin Central Railroad’s newly completed line to Lake Winnebago and Ashland, in the North Woods. Winnebago, he discovered, offered good fishing but it had already been claimed by “the noble army of tourists.” The country northwest to Stevens Point was beautiful agricultural country, but ruffed grouse had been exterminated by cultivation, and prairie chicken (which thrived in the patchwork landscape of woodlots and fields) had yet to appear. Farther north, conifer forests were being cut, but with Indian guides, the fishing and hunting was good, though not quite what was claimed by tourist promoters. “Will O’ the Wisp” found the country unimpressive but provided with good accommodations and not overrun by hunters, and it was an easy trip from Chicago.88 “Will Wildwood” took the same trip and reported a landscape altered by logging and railroads, yet still attractive to vacationers and sportsmen. It was stripped of its white pine, but islands of hardwood remained among the boreal conifer, and the woods were dotted with lumbering hamlets and camps.89 About the same time, another sportsman-writer, “Ingomar,” wrote of a trip on the Northern Pacific Railroad into northern Minnesota and Dakota Territory. Before the railroad, Ingomar recalled, this region was virtually inaccessible, and hunting and fishing “was the hardest of hard work; nothing but trails to travel on, without a house or white man’s habitation from Lake Superior to the Mississippi River.” Now, Pullman cars took sportsmen and their wives and families to hamlets that afforded good hotels, teams and guides, and reasonably priced weekly stage service into the deep boreal forest along the Canadian border, which was “one vast game preserve.”90 Such reports, even discounting sports writers’ hyperbole, give some sense of what it was like to gain access to vast stretches of nature that just a few years before had been the domain of Indian hunters and the most well-heeled and adventurous sportsmen. There was a sense of a new world of nature suddenly opening up; of a world that had before been experienced virtually, through the memoirs of big-game hunters and heroic naturalists, now accessible to middling sorts. There was a sense of the immediacy of nature, and its diversity and richness; and of the intimacy of being so easily in the middle of it all. What had once been accessible through books and travelogues became immediate, lived experience for a generation or two of sportsmen and naturalists. Many naturalists who came of age in this period later recalled their childhood experiences of twilight zones. Francis Sumner, for example: he grew up on a small orchard farm in the hilly fringe of Oakland, California, and spent his days (he was schooled at home) roaming the hills and ponds; making pets or specimens of birds, eggs, toads, and small mammals; poking sticks in ant hills; and observing the hidden life of nature. (Returning thirty years later he found the place a tawdry, jerry-built development.) As a preteen living in the inexpensive outskirts of Colorado Springs, then a village of 2,500, Sumner hiked in the canyons of the nearby Front Range and collected fossil ammonites and Indian artifacts. As a teenager in Minneapolis, again on the sparsely settled outskirts of the city (the best his impecunious family could afford), he roamed the woods and lakes with shotgun ready, observing the wildlife and feeling “the thrill of real exploration,” and later trying his hand at taxidermy. It was not science that intrigued him then—it never occurred to him to consult books of natural history—but nature and the pleasures of discovering it for himself.91 The ecologist Henry Gleason recalled his boyish rambles in the outskirts of Decatur, Illinois: “We were not interested in any phase of science or nature study. We merely absorbed nature-lore without books or teachers. We were the only boys who knew where to find the big ‘river-bottom’ hickory nut or the coffee tree. We knew where the ground robin nested and we picked up crinoid stems from the gravel banks.”92 The political cartoonist and conservationist Jay “Ding” Darling had similarly vivid memories of the vast wetland areas of the Dakotas: The potholes and marshes of eastern South Dakota were the chief points of interest when I was a kid.... As soon as school was out and I was old enough to be turned loose on my own, I spent all my summers riding our old family horse out of Sioux City across the Big Sioux and into South Dakota and herding anybody’s cattle who would give me a job.... [T]he lakes and marshes of eastern South Dakota . . . still form my pleasantest recollections. It was the disappearance of all that wonderful endowment which stirred the first instincts I can remember of Conservation.93 The naturalist Paul Errington counted himself lucky to have been just old enough to experience, as a boy in the late 1910s, “the last of the primitive abundance of the Dakota prairies, and the irreparable changes since then are most disheartening to a naturalist of my taste.”94 This was the quintessential experience of the inner frontiers: a sense of abundance and endless novelty, yet readily accessible—not a resource to be exploited, or a wilderness to be fought and tamed, but a place to be discovered and understood. A fixture of biologists’ reminiscences and obituaries, such stories are a literary trope: a foretelling of the future scientist in the curious youth. But they also bear witness to experiences of actual places and of a particular time in the environmental history of North America. They are stylized recollections of what it felt like to inhabit the twilight zone, where wild (or wildish) nature was experienced through the ideals of town culture. So it is no surprise that the trope of the boy-naturalist especially appealed to the naturalists whose careers happened to intersect with the inner frontiers. It was an element out of which scientific identities were constructed. Abandoned regions also had a special feeling. Vestiges of a human presence in vacant places were melancholy reminders of nature’s power to outlast us and to reclaim lost terrain. Joseph Grinnell found himself in such a place in 1918 in the coastal hamlet of Morro, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was an old dilapidated town, nothing like the usual resort towns, inhabited by Swiss and Portuguese who grew beans and cattle and lived amid some of the most abundant bird life Grinnell had ever seen. “One refreshing feature of the country,” Grinnell noted, was “the total lack of no-shooting signs.... Beach, marsh, sand dunes, tule swamp, brush lands—all are open ground.”95 (Most collecting areas were private property, and collectors were trespassers.) A few years later in Baja California Grinnell found a landscape once densely inhabited and worked and now depopulated and forgotten, but again about to change: When you look on the map you will see various place-names, but for the most part these now apply only to ruins or merely to situations with no living person near. This is a country of the past; but there are signs of re-awakening, or rather, invasion. I saw an oil-well drilling outfit in operation near Cape Colnett! Also there is a marble quarry in action below San Quentin; and old mines are being prospected vigorously.96 Ecologists surveying the semi-arid plains in the early 1900s were struck by the broad wagon “roads” or parallel ruts that had been abandoned a generation earlier when the railroads came through and now stood out vividly on the landscape as bands of yellow sunflowers.97 Roads to a vanished Oz. The north woods were full of such ghostly places. The University of Michigan’s field station at Douglas Lake was set in a landscape that had been cut and burned. “Gaunt black stubs twenty to fifty feet high were a prominent feature of the landscape, and huge pine stubs showed that a magnificent pine forest had been removed some thirty years earlier.”98 Ulysses Cox, working at Lake Vermillion, in Minnesota’s north woods, improvised camp tables and a darkroom from remnants of a shack abandoned by one of the many homesteaders who had finally despaired of making a living in such a poor place and had moved on.99 The hill country of the Northeast is famously endowed with signs of abandonment. John Burroughs encountered many such places in his rambles. Near the village of Highlands in the Hudson Valley, for example, he found a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now fast relapsing into the wilderness and freedom of nature, and marked by those half-cultivated, half-wild features which birds and boys love. It is bounded on two sides by the village and highway . . . and threaded in all directions by paths and byways, along which soldiers [it was 1863], laborers, and truant schoolboys are passing at all hours of the day.100 In the mid-1920s geographers studying abandonment in New York State described a poignant twilight zone: “Disintegrating houses and barns were seen in all directions. Many buildings had disappeared entirely, and nothing but the foundations marked the site. In even more cases the former site could be located only by an old orchard or a clump of lilac bushes.” In one typical area, houses were gone on two-fifths of the farms, three-fifths of cleared land was idle, and residents lived by logging second-growth forest.101 Stone walls and cellar holes are a familiar and still haunting sightin the forests of the Green Mountains. These are landscapes full of ghosts and poised between cycles of human coming and going. The notion of an inner frontier bears a family resemblance to Leo Marx’s conception of “middle landscape.” An intellectual historian, Marx invoked the idea to explicate the knot of political and social ideals that shaped American culture in the early nineteenth century: the hope that universal ownership of land would make Americans virtuous; that America could industrialize without losing its agrarian character; and that the free-land frontier would guarantee a democratic future. These ideals, Marx found, were expressed less powerfully in formal political philosophies than in literary and especially artistic representations, and most strikingly in George Inness’s painting Lackawanna Valley of 1855. Commissioned by the Lackawanna Railroad Company (and accepted with some misgivings by the painter of romantic landscapes), this work depicts a pastoral landscape, evidently not far from a frontier (stump-land is fore-grounded), and with railroad, steam locomotive, and workshops in peaceful harmony with rural nature. In this image Inness captured the ideal of an agrarian democracy based on new land, steam-powered machines, and nature. As Marx suggested, Turner’s frontier thesis was another expression of this ideal.102 For Marx this middle landscape was not a real but a symbolic place, a cultural and moral order embodied in an imagined landscape. Marx was dealing not with physical but “moral geography,” as he put it, because the ideals of social and environmental harmony embodied in Inness’s painting were not descriptive of American society of that or any period. In the end machines would dominate nature, and property would corrupt democratic ideals, so middle landscapes could only be places of the mind—false dreams.103 But is the middle landscape a purely imagined place? To be sure, the scene Inness conjured up is not a particular place, but it may depict an actual kind of place. I have in mind interior New England in the early industrial period, when machine manufacture depended on water power, and factories were located wherever streams and rivers were unused, which was increasingly in the deep countryside. Steam power would soon reverse this rural dispersal; but for a few decades, there existed a middle landscape or inner frontier in which machines and nature were in fleeting intimacy. Is it fanciful to think that the experience of such places fostered an optimistic view of industrialization like Inness’s vision in Lackawanna Valley, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of a working nature?104 Likewise with the inner frontiers created a generation or two later by the forced expansion of railways, suburbs, and homesteading: they too, I think, shaped Americans’ perceptions of their natural world. The point is simply that landscapes embody cultural values, as landscape historians have repeatedly demonstrated.105 And partly humanized landscapes may be especially potent in evoking such sentiments, because they visibly display both our own and nature’s power at the same time. If water mills in rural outbacks could foster an optimistic view of industrialization, so too might the landscapes transformed by steam technology inspire an image like Inness’s Lackawanna Valley, with engines in the place of vanished water mills. Moral landscapes may be real in experience as well as in memory. Historians who have used and extended Marx’s concept have applied it quite convincingly to particular places. Thomas Schlerith characterizes the campground headquarters of the Chautauqua movement—a quasi-religious intellectual revival—as a “middle landscape of the middle class.”106 And the historian Susanna Zetzel wittily likens Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park to a “garden in the machine”: [L]ike the railroad paintings and literary pastorals, it occupies a middle ground between the two extremes of pastorial ideal and urbanism.... From the point of view of the “frontier” the park represented civilization; from the point of view of the “city” it represented rural values. It was, in short, a pastoral “middle landscape.”107 Olmsted’s naturalistic urban parks were not, as many scholars have asserted, a nostalgic and phony “wilderness” into which stressed-out bourgeoisie could escape from urban turmoil. In fact, Olmsted meant parks to encourage people of all sorts to socialize, in a way that neither artificial promenades nor rural countrysides could do. Artfully naturalistic settings, with winding walkways and greenswards, were designed to strengthen, not escape, urban folkways. They were an inner-urban twilight zone in which nature served as symbolic guarantee that urbanity was consistent with older rural values. College campuses, whose design was powerfully influenced by Olmsted’s ideas (especially land-grant college campuses), were another such place.108 Here parklike surroundings reassured collegians that intellect and knowledge—including knowledge of nature—had a place in a striving commercial and industrial society. In the same way, I would argue, the mosaic landscapes of the inner frontiers encouraged Americans to see nature neither as a commodity to be used up, nor as a wilderness to be left alone, but as a place of cultural and scientific interest, to be surveyed, collected, conserved, and understood. My version of the Turner thesis. The period of the inner frontiers was a brief moment in the environmental history of North America, spanning just a little more than half a century, and the same forces that created them worked to destroy them. Demographic pressure and a commercial society’s hunger for property and profit drowned islands of nature in a rising tide of development. Tourist and vacationing economies in time did as much to alter as to preserve semiwild outbacks. And then there is automobility: nothing was as destructive of inner frontiers as the family auto and state-subsidized systems of improved roads, as countrysides were engulfed in waves of suburban sprawl. But during the time that the inner frontiers were a dominant feature of the landscape, they made the natural world accessible in a way it had not been before. And among those who took advantage of that accessibility were collectors and survey biologists, the Noahs of nature’s diversity. The surveys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were made possible by the new ease of getting to places that had not hitherto been intensively surveyed and collected. As the infrastructure of global trade and imperialism had opened new areas of the world to European collectors in the early nineteenth century, so did the infrastructure of national expansion and settlement open new areas to American naturalists in the age of inner frontiers. Survey was a mode of scientific practice especially suited to such places, and place and practice arose and declined together. But physical accessibility is only half the story. Places may be easy to get to, but if people do not have reasons to go there, places will remain unvisited and unknown. Of course, naturalists and collectors always have a compelling reason to visit places they have not yet seen: to find new things. But survey collecting involved more than trips by a few professional collectors. Expeditions required money, organization, institutional support; they depended on public interest. And comprehensive collections could not exist without large museums and herbaria to house them. Survey naturalists operated in a complex web of social relations, and many sorts of people required reasons of their own to take an interest in sending groups of collectors into the inner frontiers. It was the inner frontiers’ intimate mix of town culture and semi-wild nature that got Americans to take a scientific interest in nature’s biodiversity. Accessibility brought people of various sorts into contact with deep nature, enabling them to experience nature as a part of town culture: the culture of schools, colleges, and amateur natural history societies. The closeness of inner frontiers to towns thus encouraged a more naturalistic interest in the natural world. Where the cheap-land frontier encouraged a view of nature as a commodity and exploitable resource, the inner frontiers encouraged Americans to see nature as a resource for intellectual work. In the one kind of place, nature seemed boundless for the taking; in the other, visiting naturalists were never unaware that this resource was fleeting. It was this new (or newly prevalent) way of experiencing nature that inspired patrons, museum builders, and collectors to survey America’s and the whole world’s flora and fauna in an organized and comprehensive way. 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The largest natural crystals on Earth have been discovered in two caves within a silver and zinc mine near Naica, in Chihuahua, Mexico, according to mine officials. Reaching lengths of 50 feet, the clear, faceted crystals are composed of selenite, a crystalline form of the mineral gypsum. The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a working mine that is known for its extraordinary crystals. Naica is a lead, zinc and silver mine in which large voids have been found, containing crystals of selenite (gypsum) as large as 4 feet in diameter and 50 feet long. The chamber holding these crystals is known as the Crystal Cave of Giants, and is approximately 1000 feet down in the limestone host rock of the mine. The crystals were formed by hydrothermal fluids emanating from the magma chambers below. The cavern was discovered while the miners were drilling through the Naica fault, which they were worried would flood the mine. The Cave of Swords is another chamber in the Naica Mine, containing similar large crystals . Largest Selenite Crystals In The World In April 2000, brothers Eloy and Javier Delgado found what experts believe are the world’s largest crystals while blasting a new tunnel 1,000 feet down in the silver and lead Naica Mine of southern Chihuahua. Forty-year-old Eloy climbed through a small opening into a 30- by 60-foot cavern choked with immense crystals. "It was beautiful, like light reflecting off a broken mirror," he says. He said that the sight was beautiful “…like light reflecting off a broken mirror”. The translucent crystals lie pitched atop one another, as though moonbeams suddenly took on weight and substance. One month later, another team of Naica miners found an even larger cavern adjacent to the first one. As a professional photographer who specializes in environmentally difficult, narrow and wet canyons worldwide, it was almost impossible to obtain clear photographs even using every trick and technique I know, because of the extreme ambient environment. These crystals are probably stable, as the temperature in the cave is over 150 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity. In other words, these structures are enveloped in steam. As a photographer used to working in dark and dangerous environments, this experience was unique. A human can only function in this environment for six to ten minutes before severe loss of mental functions occurs. I was so excited while photographing the crystals that I really had to focus and concentrate intensely on getting back out the door, which was perhaps only thirty to forty feet away. "Walking into either of these caves is like stepping into a gigantic geode," said Richard D. Fisher, an American consultant with the mining company to develop the discoveries as tourist attractions. Fisher said that most people can endure only a few minutes in the caves due to their high temperatures. The smaller of the two caves, which is about the size of two-bedroom apartment, is 100 Fahrenheit. The large chamber, which Fisher describes as the size of a Cathedral, is 150 F. Both are located approximately 1200 feet below the surface. The largest previously known crystals were found in the nearby Cave of the Swords, part of the same mine system. Some of these are now on display at the Smithsonian Institution. The local government and mine owners hope to avoid removing any of the new discoveries for museum displays or private collections, Fisher said. While the mine company is currently limiting visitation of the caves to scientific experts, mineral hunters have destroyed locks and broken into the chambers twice since they were first opened by mining equipment last April. One man was killed when he attempted to chop out a gigantic crystal that fell from the ceiling and pinned him.”The heat did him in” according to Fisher. "We need more onsite protection of mine caves," said geologist Carol A. Hill, co-author of the book Cave Minerals of the World, who calls the new discoveries "by far the largest selenite crystals I have ever heard of." Hill applauds the tourism plan. "Without it, the mining company would probably destroy the caves. Museums have enough crystals," she said. "It's important to preserve discoveries like this where they occur." The mining company plans to air-condition the caves before opening them to the public next year, Fisher said. He adds that reducing the heat gradually will not harm the crystals. Officials of the Penoles Company, which owns the mine, kept the discoveries secret out of concern about vandalism. Not many people, however, would venture inside casually: the temperature hovers at 150 degrees, with 100 percent humidity. A person can stay inside the cave for only six to ten minutes before becoming disoriented. These mountains are 200 million year old limestone massifs hosting networks of caves crossed by very deep hot and mineralized thermal waters. When these waters reached the relatively colder and closer to the surface environments they deposited much of their salt content as lead,zinc and silver . Groundwater in these caves, rich with sulfur from the adjacent metal deposits, began dissolving the limestone walls, releasing large quantities of calcium. This calcium, in turn, combined with the sulfur to form crystals on a scale never before seen by humans. In addition to 4-foot diameter crystal columns 50 feet in length, the cavern contains row upon row of shark-tooth-shaped formations up to 3 feet high, which are set at odd angles throughout. This crystal form of the mineral gypsum, is known as selenite, named after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon. When Naica's ores are no longer viable, the mine is closed and the pumping is stopped, then the caves will be submerged - and the crystals will start growing again. The only reason humans can get in the caves at all is because of the ongoing pumping operations that keep them clear of water. Flash with backlighting Picture with flash only The city of Chihuahua is the state capital of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. It has a population of about 748,551. The predominant activity is light industry.The Naica Mine is located 100km to the N.E. Chihuahua, Mexico is home to two hot caverns containing the largest natural crystals known to man. "Walking into either of these caves is like stepping into a (sweltering) gigantic geode," described one awed observer. One of the clear selenite crystals is over 50 feet long and weighs over 55 tons. A forest of crystals , the largest on the Planet. An unreal world, beyond imagination, beyond a dream. A cave with a temperature of 50° C and 100% humidity; an infernal place, where man can survive just a few minutes. Still mostly unexplored. Naica Crystal Cave Of Giants END Click to exit
Do you remember growing up in the days of playing marbles as a kid in school? Outside our elementary school, between the brick school and the asphalt playground, was a long strip of just plain dirt about three feet wide and the length of the building. It was in the pristinely manicured dirt that boys (boys only – it was an unwritten rule) played marbles. It wasn’t that the boys refused to allow the girls to play. As I recall it, we were yucky and we had cooties so the girls would rather be jumping rope or playing on the swings. They chose their own games because playing marbles was just dumb. I can recall having my very own faux leather marble bag alternating green and tan sections with a leather drawstring at the top. It was great to show off your best Cat’s Eye or sky blue marble and if you had Jumbos or Steelies, you had a marble shooter’s weapon of choice! The game, for all those who are marble deficient in your education began with a circle drawn in the dirt. A stick, pencil or ruler would do, but most often, the always handy index finger was the best. The game began with each player putting a marble in the circle and, in turn, you used your shooter marble to try and knock your opponents’ marbles out of the circle; at which point, it became yours. This is critical to understanding the game. The shooter who wins a marble gets to keep shooting until he misses or the marble hit does not roll out of the circle. The marbles not rolling out, stay in the circle and are fair game for anyone to shoot at, and if skilled or lucky, to win. Some kids left the game having lost all their marbles. (No pun intended!) Those guys would be found on the weekend scrounging for empty pop bottles to return to the store for the 2 cent deposit refund. They would use their new found cash to return to the Five and Dime store to buy more marbles before the next school week. In today’s politically correct world, there would be a hue and cry raised across the land if Little Johnny came home without his marbles because some other kid had won them! That’s not fair! We have to teach our kids that everyone is a winner! Everything must be equal! This is America – everything is to be fair and equal! If you do a word search of either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States and try to find fair and equal you will find only one sentence. “… all men are created equal.” That all persons start out equal in life is a far cry from believing that society must seek to insure that everything is fair and equal. Consider a game of marbles made to be fair and equal as determined by today’s Pablum pushing professors and politicians. If Little Johnny knocks Jimmy’s marble out of the circle, he must immediately return it to Jimmy and apologize for targeting him. To be equal, too, no one person should have more marbles than anyone else so the teacher will maintain control of the bags of marbles; making certain that each one has the same number, size and type. She will issue them out at recess and retrieve them when recess concludes. Any student who gathers pop bottles on Saturday morning (if this were possible) to buy his own marbles Saturday afternoon will have to give those to the teacher on Monday. The teacher then will divide them equally into the bags. Sound ridiculous? Ask any elementary school child if they play any games at school where some kids win and some kids lose; where some get a reward and others get nothing. Since public schools are the purveyors of political correctness for the proletariat, they have created a society norm of fair and equal that can only be recreated in the real world by militant methodologies such as what Karl Marx lovingly brought to the people of Mat’ Rossija or Mother Russia. The context in the statement All men are created equal and a precise reading of it makes it clear that all men are created, or begin their lives, as equal. In God’s sight, every person is His divine creation for whom His Son, Jesus Christ, suffered crucifixion for the redemption of all. It does not infer that all persons are to be equal in all things such as individual prosperity or achievement. Among the inalienable rights endowed upon His creation by God, Himself, is, as the Declaration of Independence describes it) the pursuit of happiness. It is not that we have the right to be happy but, rather free to seek our happiness through lawful endeavors. Everyone may be allowed to play marbles but only one wins. If the Founding Fathers did not see a place for fairness and equality in achievement or prosperity, then from where does such an idea originate; and, more importantly, where does it lead? In the mid- 1800’s the nation clamored to understand and define the relationships between races and the immorality of slave ownership. President Lincoln did not attempt to make the case for an equality of mankind. Rather, he simply states that all slaves are to be free. They were not eligible to vote and many other measures of segregation remained for decades. In the early 1900’s, the advent of workers’ unions battled for fair wages and in some respects, equality by job or function (except in the matters of race or sex). Inequalities were innumerable. The Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson blurred the lines of historical fact. They interpreted the context of the Declaration in their attempt to justify a role for the government to enforce an equality of opportunity for all and subjectively applied a concept of equality and fairness in the strict sense unintended by the Founding Fathers. The unintended (or, at least, undeclared) consequences of the purposely ambiguous wording has opened a Pandora’s Box of liberal thought and social reform in the name of equality and fairness. I do not argue that everyone should not have an equal opportunity; but, that does not mean that I will ever have the gifts or skill to perform certain jobs and I should not expect that legislation will afford me that job regardless of my abilities. Dr. King and President Johnson would likely agree. Today, however, common sense and reason have left the room and are not expected to return anytime soon! The institutions of higher learning, particularly government funded universities, the education assembly lines, tasked with processing through the teachers of the next generations, have been complicit in the promotion of everything equal and fair. Every student is a winner and every competition is for the fun of the play with no need to keep score. Never are there any losers. There is one particularly glaring flaw in the No Losers world and that is – it creates a plethora of losers! All of those who truly achieved must lose their victory. The one who had the skill, patience and made the effort to be the best marble shooter ends up losing his marbles when everyone wins. The best and brightest, as sought by President Kennedy, become instead a nation of Tootles. When achievement and success are not rewarded and every person receives identical compensation, regardless of effort put forth; then eventually, all will gravitate to the lowest median effort. America can find itself becoming a nation of couch potato type undeserving welfare recipients who do only the minimum required to stay in the system. Not very long ago, President Obama declared that there was no such thing as American Exceptionalism. In his view of the Great Society, he is correct. No longer need anyone try harder, study more and challenge the norm because there is no longer any reward for such effort. Why would Baskin Robbins need thirty-one flavors if everyone wants vanilla? One item on every menu in every restaurant that is identical to all others is all that is needed. One car of the people as Hitler envisioned or a return to Henry Ford’s quip, ” People can get the Model T in any color as long as its black.” (thequotepedia.com) When we, as a nation, choose fair and equal, we set a course for mediocrity. Pride taken in one’s efforts and accomplishments is judged as out of step with society. Those nations who do inspire vision, reward effort and recognize excellence will soon hold all the marbles. Then, like Tootles, all we can do is cry, Peter, I’ve lost all my marbles!
Bacteria are able to build camouflaged homes for themselves inside healthy cells - and cause disease - by manipulating a natural cellular process. Purdue University biologists led a team that revealed how a pair of proteins from the bacteria Legionella pneumophila, which causes Legionnaires disease, alters a host protein in order to divert raw materials within the cell for use in building and disguising a large structure that houses the bacteria as it replicates. Zhao-Qing Luo, the associate professor of biological sciences who headed the study, said the modification of the host protein creates a dam, blocking proteins that would be used as bricks in cellular construction from reaching their destination. The protein "bricks" are then diverted and incorporated into a bacterial structure called a vacuole that houses bacteria as it replicates within the cell. Because the vacuole contains materials natural to the cell, it goes unrecognized as a foreign structure. Click "source" to read the entire article.
General management vs. strategic managementGeneral management: Is the process of acheiving organizational goal by engaging in four major functions of planing, organizing, leading and contolring. Bartol, Kathryn m 2006, Management: A Pacific Rim Focus, McGraw-Hill/Irwin GM concerns about the process to manage the company internally – (operational effectiveness), GM is not focusing on exploring competitiveness in relation to ext. envir. GM does not include the strategyStrategic management: Strategy is focusing on the competitivness of the company by performing different activities from rivals or performing similiar activities in different ways Porter, Michael E. 1996. What is Strategy? Harvard Business Review. Nov/Dec 1996. Strategic management is the process of 3 primary activities: 1. Formulation: Organization Mission, Competitive Situations, Strategy Development 2. Implementation: Organization alignment that should be considered for changing the organization to support the operations based on the formulated strategies 3. Controling and Evaluation: financial perspective, customer perspective, internal process perspective, and learning and growth perspective. Suksriwong, Sakorn 2007, Management : From the Executive’s Viewpoint, Bangkok What is the strategy? Ethymological fundament - Greek language “stratçgos”; „Stratus“ – army, „ago” – move, run, lead "Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expect“ Johnson and Scholes (Exploring Corporate Strategy) Direction: Where is the business trying to get to in the long-term? Scope of act. : Which markets should a business compete in and what kind of activities are involved in such markets? Advantage: How can I perform the business better than the others? Resources: What resources are abilities are required? Environment: What external environmental factors affect the ability to compete? Stakeholders: What are the values and expectations of those who have power? Strategy definitions: The Strategy is over the space and the time tactical and purpose-build configuration and exploration of organizational resources, planed and managed based on actual, planed and forecasted conditions of the internal and external environment of the organization, providing most efficient way for organizational objectives achievements, with limited or acceptable consequences from third parties reactions. Strategy formulation: Mission statement: Reason / reasons to exist Scope of operations Analysing the situation (how particular factors support or depress the organization) : External Environment (factors): Macro environment National competetiveness (2BCognituss Wiena, De Deught Swizerland) Industry attractiveness External analysis builds on an economics perspective of industry structute and how a firm can make the most of competing in trhat structure. Internal Environment (factors): Correlation among the organization activities and business functions Core competencies of the organization exploration The internal analysis based on operation activities and its competencies with in the organization. Set of strategies that gain supportive environments and prevent obstructive factors Grand strategy (corporate strategy) – growth, stabilisation, exit Business strategy – differentiation (by value, by price) Functional strategy – related to the business functions of the company Basic methods for strategic analyses Mission - Evaluation sheet method External Environment: Macro Environment – 5 major functions model National Competitiveness - The Diamond of National Advantage Industry Attractiveness - 5 forces model Internal analysis: Value Chain Analysis, Business Function Analysis, Core Competencies Analysis. Organization Mission The organization’s purpose or fundamental reason for existence, expressed by Mission statement Broad declaration of the basic, unique purpose and scope of operations that distinguish the organization from other of it type. Bartol, Kathryn M 2006, Management: A Pacific Rim Focus, McGraw-Hill/Irwin. 9 components to formulate mission statement: 1. Customers - Who are the organization’s customers? 2. Products or services. What are the organization’s major? 3. Location. Where does the organization compete? 4. Technology. What is the firm’s basic technology? 5. Concern for survival. What is the organization’s commitment to economic objectives? 6. Philosophy. What are the basic belief, values, aspirations, and philosophical priorities of the organization? 7. Self-concept. What are the organization’s major strengths and competitive advantages? 8. Concern for public image. What are the organization’s public responsibilities,and what image is desired? 9. Concern for employees. What is the organization’s attitude toward its employees? Concern for Self-concept. Concern for public imageStarbucks Concern for Employeeso Technology. Philosophy. Products or Customers. Location. ServicesMissions and SurvivalComponentsThe premier purveyor of thefinest coffee in the world while X X X X Xmaintaining our uncompromisingprinciples as we grow.Provide a great workenvironment and treat each X Xother with respect and dignityEmbrace diversity as anessential component in the way Xwe do business.Apply the highest standards ofexcellence to the purchasing, X Xroasting and fresh delivery ofour coffee.Develop enthusiastically Satisfiedcustomers all of the time XContribute positively to our Xcommunities and our EnvironmentRecognize that profitability is Zdroj: Internetové materiály spoločnosti Starbucks Macro Environment C ompetitive situation: affects overall of the business situation. Consideration of 5 major factors as the information for developing the strategy according to the host country : Legislation and Regulations, General Economic Conditions, Societal Values and Lifestyles, Population Demographics, Technology PEST Analysis: •external analysis that investigates four macro-environment factors: Political Economic Social Technology Political Banking system Dominant religion R&D activities stability Interest rates Minorities Automation Tax policies Exchange rates Attitude towards Technology Tariffs Earning per foreign products incentives Regulations capita Leisure hours Justice system Gross Domestic Education Product (GDP) Working skills Inflation rate Age distributionSupports better understanding the risk and pitfalls for the environment you operate in.Good tool to identify macro-environment level opportunities and threats in SWOTCan be combined with SWOT 4P4C Analysis: Product Price Promotion Place Feature and Customer Suitable pricing Moste desiredConsumer. qualities of responded schemes sales channel product wanted promotion Pricing Product Competitors schemes Types ofCompetitor features offerd sales eployed by promotion by competition channels competitors Features and Current Current pricing Current salesCompany qualities offerd promotion strategies chanels by company plan Pricing Community Favourable Allowed strategiesCommunity Features promotion distribution encouraged Pathers strategies channels and supported•Anables to: •refine company’s current marketing mix in respect with consumer needs, •respond to competitors’ actions, •know the limitations for various strategies within the community. NationalCompetitiveness: the company should analyze the competiveness in the state level in order to find the opportunities and threats influenced on the industry that firm challenges national competitiveness is created and sustained through a highly localized process. It differences in national values, culture, economic structures, institutions, and histories all contribute to competitive success. The Diamond of National Advantage: 1.Factor Conditions. The nation’s position in factors of production, such as skilled labour or infrastructure, necessary to compete in a given industry. 2.Demand Conditions. Home-market demand for the industry’s product or service. 3.Related and Supporting Industries. The presence or absence in the nation of supplier industries and other related industries that are internationally competitive. 4.Firm Strategy, Structure and Rivalry. The conditions in the nation governing how companies are created, organized, and managed, as well as the nature of domestic rivalry. Industry Attractiveness - 5 forces modelPorter, Michael E. 2008, “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy”, HarvardBusiness Review, January 2008Vertical line:•Is about the competition in the certain industry regarding 3 factors; •Industry Competitors, •New Entrants, •Substitutes Horisontal line: •Iis about the industry operation showing the correlation among: • suppliers, producers, • merchandises, and buyerss Korean Cosmetics Attractiveness1. Rivalry among competitors: High- Large number of brands in the mkt.- Industry growth: + 3.4% over 2006- Low product differences2. Rarriers to entry: High- Brand Identity preferencees- Government restrictions- Large nubmer of brands in the mkt.3. Threat of substitutes: Low- Substituted product avalaiability4. Bargaining power of suppplier: Moderate- Differentiation of input- Impacct of inputs on costs- Threath of forward integration5. Bragaining power of buyer: High- Buyers needs- Market size- Brand Identity- Product differentiation Value Chain Analysis Porter, Michael E. 1985, How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage, Free Press, New York a systematic tool to analyze the interaction among all the activities a firm performs it emphasizes that competitive advantage can come not just from great products or services, but from anywhere along the value chain it is also important to understand how a firm fits into the overall value system, which includes the value chains of its suppliers, channels, and buyers. This concept divides a company’s activities, value activities, into the technology and economically distinct activities it performs to do business. Malaysian national airline valuechain analysis Business functionsanalysis: tools to investigate the organization performance by focusing on organizvational functions, Examples: Marketing analysis – investigation about companies market share, customer satisfaction, customer preferencees Productions analysis – investigation about productivity product quality, ... Human resource management analysis – investigation about personel competencies, organizational structure, ... Finantial analysis – investigation about profitability and liquidity Core Competencies Analysis: Bartol, Kathryn M 2006, Management: A Pacific Rim Focus, McGraw-Hill/Irwin Exmination of the resources, capabilities and competencies which are considered as a major and most importat ones in the organization. „CC’s“ are: Variouse assets of the company, which are different from competitors ones, and is difficult to distinguish and imitate them. F.e.: Financial resources: debt, equity, retained earnings, money reserves. Physical resources: buildings, machinery, vehicles, raw materials. Human resources: skills, abilities, experience, organiyational chart. part of highly protected know-how of the company supposed to be the fountain of the organizational competetive advantage collective learning in the organization how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technology. Company should identify the organization regarding 3 factors; a potential access to wide variety of markets, a significant contribution to end user value, difficulty for competitors to imitate Examples: Sony - miniaturization. Canon - microprocessor controls copiers, printers, cameras, and image SWOT Analysis: The tool to classify the environment effecting the organization by identification of internal and external factors with the favourable and unfavourable impact to the organization, dividing them in to 4 groups: 1. Strengths - organization’s strong points in internal environment, comming from resources and competencies available within the organiyation, with a potential to create a competetive advantage 2. Weaknesses - organization’s weak points in internal environment, comming from resources and competencies available within the organiyation, with a potential a competetive disadvantage 3. Opportunities – acciedntal external invironment factors with the potential to support organization activities. 4. Threats – acciedntal external invironment factors with the potential to diminish organization activities ADVANTAGE DISADVANTAGE INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT Strengths Weaknesses EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT Opportunities Threats STRATEGIC ACTION Move on, GO! Protect, Improve, Quit Misterious SWOT history? 1960-1970, Albert Humphrey, Stanford University, research project US Fortune 500. Humphrey developed Team Action Model (TAM) - a management concept that enables groups of executives to manage change. SWOT was to have originated from his ‘Stakeholders Concept and SWOT Analysis.’ 1960, Harward University (Haberberg, 2000) 1987, Igor Ansoff, Ansoff’s Matrix fame (Turner (2002) Existed publications relates names to SWOT rather users then inventors (http://www.marketingteacher.com/swot/history-of-swot.html). Koch (2004) comments he recognised that a series of SWOT/TOWS analyses had the advantages of a single arbitrary matrix. Wheelan and Hunger (1998) used SWOT to look for gaps and matches between competences and resources and the business environment. Dealtry (1992) considered SWOT in terms or groups and vectors with common themes and interactions. Shinno et al (2006) amalgamated SWOT analysis with an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) which ranked and prioritised each element using software. Weaknesses: 1. Disadvantages of proposition? 2. Gaps in capabilities? 3. Lack of competitive strength? 4. Reputation, presence and reach? 5. Financials? 6. Own known vulnerabilities? 7. Timescales, deadlines and pressures? 8. Reliability of data, plan predictability? 9. Morale, commitment, leadership? 10.Accreditation, etc? 11.Cashflow, start-up cash-drain? 12.Continuity, supply chain robustness? 13.Effects on core activities, distraction? 14.Processes and systems, etc? 15.Management cover, succession? Opportnities: 1. Market developments? 2. Competitors vulnerabilities? 3. New USPs? 4. Tactics - surprise, major contracts, etc? 5. Business and product development? 6. Information and research? 7. Partnerships, agencies, distribution? 8. Industry or lifestyle trends? 9. Technology development and innovation? 10.Global influences? 11.New markets, vertical, horizontal? 12.Niche target markets? 13.Geographical, export, import? 14.Volumes, production, economies? 15.Seasonal, weather, fashion influences? Threats:1. Political effects?2. Legislative effects?3. Obstacles faced?4. Insurmountable weaknesses?5. Environmental effects?6. IT developments?7. Competitor intentions - various?8. Loss of key staff?9. Sustainable financial backing?10.Market demand?11.New technologies, services, ideas?12.Vital contracts and partners?13.Sustaining internal capabilities?14.Economy - home, abroad?15.Seasonality, weather effects? HP SWOT Opportunities: Analysis: Cloud computing market The global spending on cloud computing is forecast Strenghts: to cross a value of over $40 billion by 2012 Bratislava – center for cloud computing Brand name Printing solutions: 11th most recognizable brand commercial printing and capturing high-value pages 40% MKT over world share in printer for industrial applications, outdoor signage, and graphic arts market 3D printing 30% MKT over world shere in server market Threats: Strategic allaiences: over world IT MKT recession: Compaq Computer Corporation in 8% decline by 2011 worldwide 2002, Worldwide economical recession Mercury Interactive in 2006 Severe competition in consumer goods market Electronic Data Systems Dell, Toshiba, Lenova Group and Aver – all of them Corporation (EDS) in 2008. worldwide 3Com in 2009 Lots of l ocal competitors Thomson eXimius Severe competition in core business market: IBM, EMC Corporation, Dell (standard servers) Sun Microsystems (UNIX-based servers), Weaknesses: Canon USA, Lexmark International, Xerox Corporation, Seiko Epson Corporation, Samsung MKT segment integration: Electronics and Dell – in printing and imaging Lack of particular SW products Lack of management consulting servicies Complicated organiyational structure High labor costs POWER SWOT: P – Personal experience Explore own personal and profesional experience O – Order Distinguish between Strengths and opportunities Threats and weaknesses The opportunity can become the threat and v.v. W – Weighting Weight SWOT elements. Count final weight of SWOT part E – Emphasize detail Every element (factor) should be preciselly described, reasoned and justified by expected conseqencees. R – Ranking Give the SWOT analysis the strategic meaning by ranking and prioritizing factors Rephrase threats as opportunities and find out how to turn weaknesses in to strengths (Use Gap Analysis) The GE/McKinsey Matrix A sort of portfolio analysis used for classifying product lines or strategic business Developed by McKinsey for General Electrics Criteria for the business areas assessment: The attractiveness of the industry/market concerned The strength of the business Vertical axis: Industry attractiveness Explains the attrectiveness to a firm of entering, remaining or quiting of particular industry, based on particular factors of the industry Horisontal axis: Strength of the business unit – how strong the SBU is in terms of the market Explain the strengths of the company in terms of supplying the market BCG matrix versus GE matrix Similarities: The focus is the future strategy for the particular area of the business Two dimensions and usually three levels at each dimension Differences Dimensions are. Industry attractiveness (instead market share) Business strength (instead market growth) Each cell represents particular strategy – more strategies to choose BSG is focusing on products within the company, GE is focusing on a strategic business units. SBU: The particular market portfolio with own business plan Part of the company with own market and target group The company unit with responsibility for strategic management of particular product The organizational part of the company BCG is part of GE matrix. Market growth is an element of industry attractvness Market growth is an element in business strength Market attractivenesscriteria Market Size Availability of: Market Growth Market intelligence Work force Sector profitability Other resources Profit margins Infrastructure Overall returns of Global opportunities industry Bank system Industry fluctuation Legal system Variabiliyty of Political system demand Natural resources Entry and exit barriers Regulatory policy SBU internal strengthscriteria: Market share Marketing: (MS) Skills Distribution network Growth in MS Sales force Product Management: uniqueness Competence, skills Company image Work force skills Service quality Brand recognition Production: Customer loyalty Capacity SBU reliability Flexibility Costs/Profitability Quality GE / McKinsey SBU internal strength Matrix High Medium Low M High attractiveness X1 Y2 Y3 A R Medium attractiveness Y4 Y5 Y6 K Low attractiveness E T Y7 Y8 Z9 X– Successful SBU – strong business, attractive industry Y – Mediocre SBU – medium business, industry less attractive Z – Disappointing SBU – weak business, unattractive business1 – Protect position 4 – Harvest 7 – Reorganize2 – Motivation 5 – Think over 8 – Reorg/Harv3 - Reorganisation 6 – Invest 6 – Quit Grow - Strong SBU units in attractive business -Strong SBU in average business or in attractive business Hold -Strong SBU in weak business -Average SBU in average business -Weak SBU in attractive business Quit -Average SBU in unattractive business -Weak SBU in average business or in unattractive business Cell no.1: Highly attractive market & hight SBU strength Invest for other growth, Search for global opportunities, Maximise market share, Seek market dominance, Secure position, Cells 2, 4: SBU strength and industry attractiveness are in high rating in one, and medium in the other. Invest for growth, Invest to expand, Search for new segments, Invest to maintain sompetitiveness, Invest to motivate Cells 3,5,7: The level of the SBU is balanced by market attractiveness Invest for earnings, Invest selectively, Maintain position, Defend position, Conctentrate for selected segments, Specialise in products where strengths can be built, Identify niches Cells 6, 8: In each cell either MA or SBU strangth is low, and the otrher one is medium Manage for cash, Do not invest unless it is necessary, Move to more profitable segments, Identify niches, Cell 9: No strength within SBU & very unattractive market Quit with reasonable procedure GE / McKinsey SBU internal strengthMatrix – case study High Medium Low 9,00M AA T HighR R 6,00K AE CT T Medium I V 3,00 I T Low Y 0,00 9,00 6,00 3,00 0,00 Differentiation strategyin One Star Hotel – valuecurveTypical 1*H setlement Customer expectation Differetiation strategy: Účasť na tvorbestratégie Legálnosť účasti na tvorbe stratégie Legitímnosť účasti na tvorbe stratégie Berie sa do úvahy vplyv: Neformálnych organizačných štruktúr Individuálnych záujmov Legálnosť účasti natvorbe stratégie Miera legálnej účasti na tvorbe stratégie, prípadne voľnosti v procese tvorby stratégií je daná mierou inštitucionalizovanej autonómnosti ale hlavne zodpovednosti v rozhodovaní. Úplná účasť: SZČO Konateľ obchodnej spoločnosti ak je zároveň aj jediný vlastník Viazaná a obmedzená účasť: Konateľ obchodnej spoločnosti Štatutárny orgán verejnoprávnej organizácie Predstavenstvo obchodnej spoločnosti a družstva Splnomocnenec v rozsahu splnomocnenia Žiadna účasť: Líniový a funkčný manažér Radový zamestnanec Legitímnosť účasti na tvorbestratégie Nie je determinovaná legálnosťou, t.j. subjekt, ktorý sa chce podieľať na tvorbe stratégie nenesie za jej tvorbu žiadnu zodpovednosť, nemá za úlohu participovať na tvorbe stratégie Je determinovaná kompetenciami subjektu (odbornosťou a schopnosťami) súladom pohnútok, osobných zámerov subjektu dôsledkov ním navrhovanej, resp. realizovanej stratégie s cieľmi organizácie
After defeat of the first Russian revolution in the country there came the reaction period. Demonstrations, meetings and meetings were forbidden, crushed Ural, Peter and Paul, Semipalatinkaya, Vernensky, Perovsky both other social democratic organizations and labor unions. Under the law of June 3, 1907 about dissolution of the II State Duma and introduction of a new election system, Kazakhs and other nationalities occupying edge, lost electoral rights. Police surveillance for employees, workers and peasants amplified. Owners of the industrial enterprises of Perovsk, Akmolinsk, Uralsk, crafts "Emba", "Dossor", etc. discharged from office "unreliable workers, brought in "black lists" of activists, organizers of performances, excitements of masses". At the enterprises performance standards, duration of the working day were increased, quotations are lowered, wide scope was received by penalties. Chernosotennye the organizations "Union of the Russian people", "Mikhail Arkhangela's Union", etc. arranged riots, kindled the race hatred. For suppression of performances of peasants immigrants, Kazakh шаруа from garrisons Cossacks, groups of chasteners went. So, in April, 1909 by cable inquiry from Perm one hundred Cossacks was sent to Kustanai for suppression of discontent of the Kazakhs opposing resettlement policy of tsarism. The aggravation of an agrarian question in the center of Russia tried to resolve the imperial government by colonization of the suburbs, including Kazakhstan, resettlement of peasants. Colonization of lands was accompanied by mass withdrawal at the Kazakh population a floor a type of "surplus" of the best fertile lands, including rendered habitable and mastered. Only in 1906 — 1912 over ten 17 million нземли were withdrawn. Under the law of June 9, 1909 land management was made on two norms: the resettlement — on 15 and nomadic — on 12 дес. Representatives of the agrarian and democratic direction, acting on an agrarian question, propagandized transition of Kazakhs to settled life. As the imperial government sought to withdraw as much as possible lands from the Kazakh population, transition to a settled form of managing allowed them to keep convenient lands, especially Kazakh шаруа it was offered to receive the earth on resettlement norm with "the right of continuous integral possession of the earth". Strengthening of national and colonial oppression, agrarian policy of tsarism, penetration of the capitalist relations into social and economic life of edge led to growth of national consciousness of the Kazakh people. National movement in the Kazakh society was non-uniform, there were the various ideological and political currents as which kernel acted the national intellectuals, graduates of universities and schools of Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Tomsk, Omsk and Orenburg. Opinion of various ideological and political currents of the national intellectuals the Aykap magazine and the Kazakh newspaper were most expressing. The Aykap magazine, выходивцшй in 1911 — 1915 (the publisher and the editor — Mukhamedzhan Seralin (1871 — 1929), expressed the agrarian and democratic directions of ideological and political thought in Kazakhstan. In it cooperated Z.Seydalin, B. Karatayev, S. M. Toraygyrov, S. Seyfullin, B. Maylin, etc. On pages of the magazine problems of the agrarian relations, education and knowledge, development of the commodity-money relations in the Kazakh aul were covered, the colonizer policy of tsarism was exposed. The agrarian question, i.e. the land relations, subsidence of nomadic economy, questions of an agriculture, change of forms of managing, etc. was the main issue in the Aykap magazine. The Kazakh newspaper leaving from 1913 to 1918, expressed ideas of the liberal and democratic direction. In it the leader of the Kazakh constitutional democratic party and national movement of the Kazakh people, the scientist-economist cooperated. Bukeykhanov, A.Baytursynov, M. Dulatov, etc. In the main thing, agrarian юпросе they made the requirement of cancellation of state ownership of the earth and its transfer to property to Kazakhs, a ban фодажи lands. Voblasti of development of political life sry the liberal and democratic direction stood up for evolutionary development of society. As a whole, despite different views about development of social and economic and political life of edge, the Aykap magazine and the Kazakh newspaper on the pages managed to express national ideas and interests of the Kazakh people in the conditions of the colonial suburb of the empire. In 1910 — 1911 in connection with new economic recovery in Kazakhstan strike movement quickened. In May, 1911 workers-railroad workers of workshops of station Perovsk and Turkestan, miners on Atbasarsky Copper Ores joint-stock company mines striked. About 300 people who demanded increase in a salary participated in a strike. On April 28, 1912 in Orenburg and on the line RSDRP city committee foklamation which called for a grazdnovaniye On the First of May extended, and also contained requirements of the 8-hour working day, political freedoms, dissolution of army and replacement with its national militia. In the summer of 1912 on the Tashkent site of the Orenburg and Tashkent kelezny road there were also excitements of 300 workers of contractor Karakhnov driven to blank despair by six-months expectation of calculation. On May 12, 1912 because of a low wage, severe conditions ore workers of Spassky copper-smelting plant went on strike. In ноне workers-builders of the Orenburg and Orsk kelezny road, Dossor's oil industry workers 1913 went on strike, in September there were excitements of workers on Chokparkulsky coal копях in the Turgaysky district. In the performances workers demanded improvement of an economic situation, the solution of social problems, made political demands which were important for development of political consciousness and determination to fight for the rights. Speech of workers of edge has impact on growth of country approaches against tsarism, development of national liberation movement. Peasants immigrants refused an apportion of taxes and yudaty, carried out unauthorized felling of the woods, many of them appeared without the allocated lands: hopelessness of situation, impoverishment of weight of peasants immigrants, strengthening of social-class stratification of the resettlement village became the reason of open introductions of peasants. The agrarian and colonial policy of autocracy was opposed also by the Kazakh workers. Feudal байская a top, owning the most part of a livestock of cattle, a pasture, I exploited poor people more and more. Widely the bribery, extortion, briberies, etc. extended. Kazakh шаруа burned down winterings of fights, refused payment of taxes, attacked military teams. The entry of Russia in world imperialistic war was hard reflected in position of workers of Kazakhstan: the sizes of taxes increased. "voluntary collecting", compulsory subscription to the state loan and the military tax, in total about 10 different types of collecting and duties were assigned to the Kazakh population. Withdrawal of lands at the Kazakh population proceeded, for needs of war requisitioned clothes, cattle and food products, forcibly mobilized transport for transportation of military freights (mainly, bread) to railway stations. During war from Turkestani edge 300 thousand poods of meat, 70 thousand heads of horses, 13 thousand camels were taken out. Only from Semirechya in 1914 it was taken out cattle and cattle breeding products for the sum of 34 million rubles. Under the guise of the help to families of the mobilized the labor duty was entered, i.e. Kazakhs as labor had to plow, sow and harvest in the resettlement village. In the years of war cultivated areas, quantity of cattle were reduced, national and colonial oppression amplified. The imperial administration artificially kindled international discord, putting forward chauvinistic slogans, armed tops of the resettlement population. The confidential instruction of the military governor of Semirechensky area obliged district chiefs to create on October 9, 1914 from "reliable Christians", from prosperous layers of the Russian village the armed groups against Muslim workers. Fight for the land plots between propertied layers of the resettlement village and the working mass of the Kazakh aul amplified. Kazakh шаруа on oppressions of fists stole horses, destroyed boundary signs, burned hay and haying sites. Kazakh шаруа also suffered from the local feudal and patrimonial tops which for a high rent handed over them the lands belonging to an aul or a rural community. Persistently fighting against eviction from the lands, Kazakh шаруа didn't fulfill requirements neither imperial officials, nor the volost managers and aulny foremen, refusing payment of taxes, taxes, fund raising for needs of war. From verbal and written protests workers of auls pass to active actions against proteges of tsarism. So, Kazakhs of the Nogay-Nurinsky volost of the Chernyaevsky district, having attacked the manager, the foreman, having taken away podatny documents, destroyed them, didn't allow them to execute official duties. In the years of war performances of peasants immigrants, soldiers and women against high cost, officials, taxes and duties amplified. In March, 1915 in Vernensky, Lepsinsky and Przhevalsky districts of Semirechensky area the country people protested against policy of the prices of the imperial government according to which peasants immigrants had to sell agriculture products at the statutory price, and buy all necessary manufactory, haberdashery products at the speculative prices. In settlements Andreevsky, Osipovsky the Lepsinsky district, the Vernensky district of the woman crushed benches of merchants, sorted goods. Performance of women in Zaisan in 1916 was stopped by means of military force, 13 people were arrested. In military units anti-war promotion was widely developed, recruits often evaded from a compulsory military service, soldiers refused to go on the front while to their families won't pay a grant. So, in 1914 of 300 soldiers in Kokchetav refused to go to the front while their families won't provide with the earth, farmstead sites and grants. Speech of soldiers was stopped by the armed force, and ten active participants are arrested and condemned on penal servitude for various terms. Similar performances took place in. True, Akmolinsky and Semipalatinsk areas. In military units the discipline sharply fell, desertion cases became frequent. In 1916 fermentation among soldiers of the local garrisons amplified, soldiers coming back from the front brought with themselves leaflets and leaflets, in increasing frequency hatred to war and tsarism openly expressed. In the years of war position of workers in the cities, working at the industrial enterprises sharply worsened. In the very first days the imperial government in all areas of Kazakhstan entered "the extraordinary martial law" according to which meetings were forbidden, strikes, strikes, evasion from work, military censorship on correspondence etc. was entered. Police surveillance amplified. Businessmen acquired the right in a wartime to subject workers to arrest, and in case of unauthorized leaving to return them for work by means of police. Despite it, in the region the discontent grew in all segments of the population. In June, 1915 Kazakh workers of ekibastuzsky and Karaganda copies, the Kyrgyz mining joint-stock company, the Spassky plant, opposing a low wage and severe conditions of work went on strike. Foreign capitalists and businessmen, using a distress of workers, strengthened operation. Systematically the salary decreased, and on price essentials constantly grew. In the summer of 1916 labor movement captured Riddersky mines, oil fields of Emba, Ekibastuzsky, Baikonur coal save, Spassky copper mines, the Orenburg, Tashkent railroads, etc. Further development of the worker, agrarian and in particular national liberation movement predetermined revolt of Kazakhs in 1916.
FFLUSH(3) BSD Programmer's Manual FFLUSH(3) fflush, fpurge - flush a stream #include <stdio.h> int fflush(FILE stream); int fpurge(FILE stream); The function fflush() forces a write of all buffered data for the given output or update stream via the stream's underlying write function. The open status of the stream is unaffected. If the stream argument is NULL, fflush() flushes all open output streams. The function fpurge() erases any input or output buffered in the given stream. For output streams this discards any unwritten output. For input streams this discards any input read from the underlying object but not yet obtained via getc(3); this includes any text pushed back via ungetc(3). Upon successful completion 0 is returned. Otherwise, EOF is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error. [EBADF] stream is not an open stream, or, in the case of fflush(), not a stream open for writing. The function fflush() may also fail and set errno for any of the errors specified for the routine write(2). write(2), fclose(3), fopen(3), setbuf(3) The fflush() function conforms to ANSI X3.159-1989 ("ANSI C"). MirOS BSD #10-current June 4, 1993 1 Generated on 2016-01-17 04:51:01 by $MirOS: src/scripts/roff2htm,v 1.82 2016/01/02 20:05:08 tg Exp $ These manual pages and other documentation are copyrighted by their respective writers; their source is available at our CVSweb, AnonCVS, and other mirrors. The rest is Copyright © 2002–2016 The MirOS Project, Germany. This product includes material provided by mirabilos. This manual page’s HTML representation is supposed to be valid XHTML/1.1; if not, please send a bug report – diffs preferred.
Individual differences \| Methods \| Statistics \| Clinical \| Educational \| Industrial \| Professional items \| World psychology \| Krogh's principle states that "For such a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice or a few such animals on which it can be most convienently studied." This concept is central to those disciplines of biology that rely on the comparative method, such as neuroethology, comparative physiology, and more recently functional genomics. Krogh's principle is attributed to Danish physiologist August Krogh, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his contributions to understanding the anatomy and physiology of the capillary system. This principle first emerges in a 1929 treatise on the then current 'status' of physiology. In this article, Krogh puts forward the following opinion (emphasis added): ...I want to emphasize that the route by which we can strive toward the ideal is by a study of the vital functions in all their aspects throughout the myriads of organisims. We may find out, nay, we will find out before very long the essential mechanisims of mammilian kidney function, but the general problem of excretion can be solved only when excretory organs are studied wherever we find them and in all their essential modificuations. Such studies will be sure, moreover, to expand and deepen our insight into problems of the human kidney and will prove of value also from the narrowest utilitarian point of view. For such a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice or a few such animals on which it can be most convienently studied. Many years ago when my teacher, Christian Bohr, was interested in the respiratory mechanisim of the lung and devised the method of studying the exchange through each lung separately, he found that a certain kind of tortise possessed a trachea dividing into the main bronchi high up in the neck, and we used to say as a laboratory joke that this animal had been created expressly for the purposes of respiration physiology. I have no doubt that there is quite a number of animals which are similarily "created" for special physiological purposes, but I am afraid that most of them are unknown to the men for whom they were "created," and we must apply to the zoologists to find them and lay our hands on them."—August Krogh, The Progress of Physiology, The American Journal of Physiology, 1929. 90(2) pp. 243-251 More recently, at the International Society for Neuroethology meeting in Nyborg, Denmark in 2004, Krogh's principle was cited as a central principle by the group at their 7th Congress. Krogh's principle has also been receiving attention in the area of Functional genomics, where there has been increasing pressure and desire to expand genomics research to a more wide variety of organisms beyond the traditional scope of the field. Philosophy & ApplicationsEdit A central concept to Krogh's principle is evolutionary adaptation. Evolutionary theory maintains that organisms are suited to particular niches, some of which are highly specialized for solving particular biological problems. These adaptations are typically exploited by biologists in several ways: - Methodology: (i.e. Taq polymerase and PCR): The need to manipulate biological systems in the laboratory has driven the use of an organismal specialization. One example of Krogh's principle presents itself in the heavily used Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a method which relies on the rapid exposure of DNA to high heat for amplification of particular sequences of interest. DNA Polymerase enzyme from many organisms would denature at high temperatures, however Chien and colleagues turned to a strain of bacteria that is native to hydrothermal vents Thermus aquaticus to solve this problem. Thermus aquaticus has a polymerase that is heat stable at temperatures necessary for PCR. Biochemically modified Taq polymerase, as it is usulally called, is now routinely used in PCR applications. - Overcoming technical limitations: (i.e. large neruons in Mollusca): Two Nobel Prize winning bodies of study were facilitated by using ideas central to Krogh's principle to overcome technical limitations in nervous system physiology. The ionic basis of the action potential was elucidated in the squid giant axon, discovered by John Zachary Young. In 1958 Hodgkin and Huxley, and , developers of the original voltage clamp device and co-recipients of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The voltage clamp is now a central piece of technology in modern neurophysiology, but was only possible to develop using the wide diameter of the squid giant axon. Another marine mollusc, the nudibranch Aplysia possesses relatively small number of large nerve cells that are easily identified and mapped from individual to individual. Aplysia was selected for these reasons for the study of the cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory which led to Eric Kandel's receipt of the Nobel Prize in 2000. - Understanding more complex/subtle systems (i.e. Barn owls and sound localization): Beyond overcoming technical limitations, Krogh's principle has particularly important implications in the light of convergent evolution and homology. Either because of evolutionary history, or particular constraints on a given niche, there are not infinite solutions to all biological problems. Instead, organisms utilize similar neural algorithms, behaviors, or even structures to accomplish similar tasks. If one's goal is to understand how the nervous system might localize objects using sound, one may take the approach of using an auditory 'specialist' such as the barn owl studied by Mark Konishi, Eric Knudsen and their colleagues. A nocturnal predator by nature, the barn owl relies heavily on using precise information on the time of arrival of sound in it's ears. The information gleaned from this approach has contributed heavily to our understanding of how the brain maps sensory space, and how nervous systems encode timing information. Further reading Edit - Bennett AF (2003). Experimental evolution and the Krogh Principle: generating biological novelty for functional and genetic analyses. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 76:1-11. PDF - Burggren WW (1999/2000). Developmental physiology, animal models, and the August Krogh principle. Zoology 102:148-156. - Chien A, Edgar DB, Trela JM (1976). "Deoxyribonucleic acid polymerase from the extreme thermophile Thermus aquaticus". J. Bacteriol 174: 1550-1557 - Crawford, DL (2001). "Functional genomics does not have to be limited to a few select organisims". Genome Biology 2(1):interactions1001.1-1001.2. - Krebs HA (1975). The August Krogh principle: "For many problems there is an animal on which it can be most conveniently studied." Journal of Experimental Zoology 194:221-226. - Krogh A (1929). The progress of physiology. American Journal of Physiology 90:243-251. - "Krogh's principle for a new era." (2003) [Editorial] Nature Genetics 34(4) pp. 345-346. - Miller G. (2004) Behavioral Neuroscience Uncaged. Science 306(5695):432-434. See also Edit \|Concepts in Neuroethology\|\| Feedforward · Coincidence detector · Umwelt · Instinct · Feature detector · Central pattern generator (CPG) ·NMDA receptor · Lateral inhibition · Fixed action pattern · Krogh's Principle·Hebbian theory· Sound localization \|History of Neuroethology\| \|Methods in Neuroethology\| \|Model Systems in Neuroethology\| \|This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).\|
If the sole known function of a gene is to activate a transcription factor, would that gene also be considered a transcription factor, or is there a word for such genes that are further upstream on the transcription activation cascade? Yes. For an example, see this list of targets of NF-kB (a transcription factor). Many other transcription factors are included there. As for a TF that does nothing except activate another, single TF? I don't know that those exist - TFs tend to modulate multiple genes. From the wikipedia article on TFs: In molecular biology and genetics, a transcription factor (sometimes called a sequence-specific DNA-binding factor) is a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow (or transcription) of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA. The nature of the gene affected is irrelevant, a protein is a transcription factor if it binds to a gene's promoter and regulates that gene's transcription. Whether the regulated gene also codes for a TF does not enter into it. You need to re-write your question, it is ambiguous and your use of terms is incorrect... Assumption: by "activation" you mean "activation of transcription resulting in the expression of the transcription factor" 1) Transcription factors are proteins 2) Genes are comprised of DNA elements A transcription factor can be involved in initiating the EXPRESSION of a transcription factor, whereafter that second distinct transcription factor initiates the EXPRESSION of another gene that encodes another transcription factor. Answer: No, genes do not "activate" transcription factors* *Unless you are proposing the philosophical question of whether the DNA binding domain itself, which endows the transcription factor with a state of being active duty (i.e. fulfilling its purpose as a transcription factor), and thus that purpose is fulfilled only when the DNA binds the the TF, then a DNA binding domain can indeed "activate" the TF... but I'm pretty sure this isn't what you're asking.
The Purim Scavenger Hunt has been developed for classroom and home use. It’s a fun way to teach the basics of the Purim Story. The Purim Scavenger Hunt consists of hidden notes -- each of which contains a message that tells a part of the Purim story. It is important that the notes be found in the correct sequence. Each note/message gives a clue about where the next card is hiding. Once a card is found, a participant or adult should read the message aloud and then follow the clue to the next one. To help keep track, an outline has been provided. The goal isn’t just to find the last note -- which a player could potentially stumble across along the way -- the goal is to learn the Purim story. 1.PRINT OUT THIS FILE DOCUMENT AND CUT OUT EACH MESSAGE ON THE DOTTED LINE. Download Text Version 2. SAVE THE FIRST MESSAGE TO GIVE OUT TO THE PLAYERS. YOU WILL NEED TO HIDE ALL THE OTHERS. 3. FEEL FREE TO USE OUR RECOMMENDATIONS AS TO WHERE TO PLACE THE NOTES IN YOUR HOME/CLASSROOM, OR COME UP WITH YOUR OWN. 4. HIDE THE MESSAGES BEFORE THE PARTICIPANTS JOIN YOU FOR THE GAME! 5. DON’T FORGET TO KEEP THE OUTLINE SHEET TO CHECK THE CORRECT ORDER OF MESSAGES AS THE PARTICIPANTS PLAY THE GAME! 6. POINTS MAY BE GIVEN, AS EACH PLAYER/TEAM UNCOVERS THE HIDING PLACE OF A MESSAGE. THE WINNER SCORES THE MOST POINTS. PLAY UNTIL THE LAST MESSAGE IS FOUND. To help you know where to hide the messages in your house or school we have provided you with the number of the message as well as the underlined words/hint. Fold up each message and tape it in, above, under or near one of the recommended locations. Feel free to use your own hiding places. 1st Clue: This message is not hidden, you give out to the players to start the game! It says Throne on it -- hinting that the NEXT message will be hidden in a place that has something to do with a "throne." 2nd Clue: The message with Undressed underlined, should be hidden near a “throne.” Home – parent’s chair School – Teacher’s chair 3rd Clue: The message with Jewish underlined, should be hidden near an object dealing with “undressed”. Home – Hamper School – Coat hooks/locker 4th Clue: The message with Diary underlined, should be hidden near an object dealing with “Jewish” – (you can ask the participants: "How does someone from the outside know that Jewish people live in this home?") Home – Mezuzah School – Mezuzah 5th Clue: The message with 13th underlined, should be hidden near a “diary.” Home – Child’s diary, parent’s calendar School – Teacher’s plan book, class calendar 6th Clue: The message with Speak underlined, should be hidden near something connected with the number “13”. Home – 13th stair, 13th book on shelf School – 13th stair of building or 13th stair leading to the second floor. 7th Clue: The message with Drinking underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “talking”. Home – Telephone, Cellphone School – Loudspeaker, Intercom, Public phone 8th Clue: The message with Reward underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “drinking”. Home – Water bottle, wine bottle, faucet School – Water fountain, faucet 9th Clue: The message with Robe/cloak underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “rewards”. Home – Reward chart, pocket book, wallet School – Reward/sticker chart, prizes, certificates. 10th Clue: The message with Tree underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “robes and cloaks” Home – Parent’s bathrobe, special coat School – Teacher’s coat 11th Clue: The message with Ring/stamp underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “trees.” Home – Indoor plant, indoor or outside tree School – Tree outside 12th Clue: The message with Purim underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “rings or stamps”. Home – Jewelry box, children’s stamping toy School – Official stamp from school office, tucked under teacher’s ring. 13th Clue: The message with Wall underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “Purim”. Home – Grogger (Purim noise maker), costume/dress up School – Purim decorations, dress up corner, grogger 14th Clue: The message with Charity underlined, should be hidden near something connected with “walls”. Home – Inside or outside wall School – Inside or outside wall 15th Clue: The message starting with “YOU’VE MADE IT” should be hidden near something connected with “charity”. Home – Tzedakah (charity) box School – Tzedakah (charity) box (Print and cut out.) 1. Three years after King Achashverosh took over the throne of Shushan, he threw a large party. 2. Queen Vashti refused to come when the king asked her to appear at the party –undressed. 3. Queen Vashti was killed for not listening to the king. A beauty contest was set up to choose the next queen. Esther was chosen as the queen. She didn’t tell anyone that she was Jewish. 4. Mordechai, Esther’s uncle, was outside the palace when he overheard Bigtan and Teresh, two of the king’s servants, conspiring to kill the king. Mordechai told Esther to inform the king, and so he saved the king’s life. The two conspirators were hung, and Mordechai's actions were written in the king’s diary, called a chronicle. 5. At the same time, Haman was appointed as assistant to the king. Haman was very angry that Mordechai wouldn’t bow down to him each time he passed. Haman decided to have a lottery to see which day he would choose to punish Mordechai and all of his people – the Jews. The day chosen was for the 13th of the Jewish month of Adar. 6. Mordechai heard what Haman was planning and told Esther to go speak to the king. He convinced her that this could be the reason she was chosen queen – to be able to convince the king and save her family and all of the Jews. 7. Esther did go to speak to the king even though she hadn’t been invited to come. The rule of the palace was that all uninvited visitors were to be killed. But the king was happy to see Esther and he asked her to name her wish. Esther said she wished to invite the king and Haman to eat and drink with her the next day. 8. That night the king couldn’t sleep and called one of his servants to read to him from his diary. He was reminded of the conspiracy to kill him and how Mordechai saved his life. He asked what reward Mordechai received for his good deed and found out that Mordechai received nothing. 9. Just then Haman came to talk to the king about his plan to punish Mordechai. But before he could say anything the king asked Haman: “What type of reward would you give a person who the king wants to honor?” Thinking that the king was speaking about himself, Haman answered: “The king should dress this person in the royal robe/cloak and crown, lead the person on the king’s horse through the streets and say this is how the king treats someone he wants to honor.” The king then told Haman to honor Mordechai that very way!! 10. Seething about having to lead Mordechai around the streets on the king’s horse, Haman went to Esther’s dinner party. At the party Esther told the king that there was a plot to kill her and her people – the Jews. “Who is this person who is doing this?” asked the king. Esther replied, “It is Haman!” The king has Haman hung that very day on the same gallows/tree that Haman wanted to hang Mordechai! 11. Mordechai was given the official ring and stamp of the King. Mordechai and Esther send out messages to all the Jews to defend themselves on the 13th day of Adar. They placed the king’s stamp of approval on the letter. 12. On the 13th day of Adar, the Jews outside the city of Shushan had to defend themselves. But they won! On the 14th day of Adar they celebrated their victory. That day becomes the holiday of Purim. 13. The Jews of Shushan (which was a city with walls all around) defended themselves on the 13th and 14th day of Adar. Only on the 15th day did they have a chance to party. Any city (such as Jerusalem), that had a wall around it in the time of Joshua, has the Holiday of Purim on the 15th day of Adar. That day is known as Shushan Purim. 14. On Purim, the Megillah (Story of Esther) is read at night and also in the morning in the Synagogue. Gift baskets are sent during the day to friends and family and charity is given to the poor. 15. You’ve made it! You found the final message. Everyone wins when you give charity. Don’t forget to drop some coins in before you have a party! Happy Purim!
Air-Pressure Lymphatic Drainage Last Updated on Saturday, 23 November 2013 Written by Administrator Lymphatic Drainage therapy – which is achieved by using a Lymfoven machine - can remove blockages in the lymph system and restore proper lymph flow. A revived lymph system cleanses the body of accumulated toxins and pollutants, and therefore boosts the immune systems response and generally rejuvenates body tissue. Lymph drainage can also help balance the nervous system, reduce stress and increase the body’s ability to relax. The Lymfoven uses a smooth pumping action that stimulates lymph drainage, which releases toxins and improves blood circulation. For this reason, the Lymfoven is recommended to those who suffer from "heavy legs" or have general circulatory problems. Since the body’s lymphatic system has no pump the lymph fluid must rely on the movement of muscles, the diaphragm, and artery pulsations in order to circulate properly. The effects of Lymph Drainage are numerous. Generally, lymph drainage affects the nervous system, smooth’s muscles, improves fluid movement in the connective tissue and may have an effect on the immune system (though this has not yet been proven). Also, the lymph drainage system stimulates the contraction of lymph vessels (through pumping and stretching of the lymph vessels). The therapy helps to move the lymph forward and drain the connective tissue. Your therapist can explain how this fantastic system can help you! Lymph Drainage can be utilised in the treatment of many different conditions including:
What Is Social Anxiety Disorder? As a Coach amd Mentor I often speak to – and help people who could be classed as having social anxiety disorder. It’s not that difficult for you to get relief from this – if you are willing to be disciplined and apply yourself over 2 – 6 weeks. So lets first have a look at what it means to have this extreme form of anxiety. You have probably experienced social situations where you feel fear and apprehension. That’s normal, it happens to most people. This commonly occurs if you are talking in front of a large group of people. This may even extend to talking in front of small groups of people and you might even feel shy or uncomfortable in any unfamiliar social situation. My opinion is that this is still normal. For some of you however these feeling are much more dramatic and simple social scenarios can become debilitating episodes, resulting in extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or you avoiding the event entirely. Anxiety in this case becomes so overwhelming for you that it interferes with the normal function of your life. If you suffer like this when it comes to social situations it’s said that you have a social anxiety disorder. How Common Is Social Anxiety Disorder. You are not alone. Statistic say that this disorder is one of the largest mental health issues in the world. I have seen statistics quoted that say 5- 10% of some western populations suffer from this. Male or female social anxiety disorder has no preference and I would guess that the figures are conservative because many people are worried about ridicule and embarrassment, so you may keep this type of issue to yourself. Triggers For Social Anxiety Disorder. This may be triggered by the following events; - Meeting new people - Public speaking - You are being watched performing a task - When you are the center of attention - If you are being teased - If someone is criticizing you. Symptoms Of Social Anxiety Disorder. The symptoms can include the following; - Heart palpitations - You may shake - Excessive sweating - You might feel nausea - A feeling of confusion - You may blush Do You have Social Anxiety Disorder? This is an interesting question because many of the symptoms listed above are also present if you are nervous and stressed about a situation. If you have social anxiety disorder you often also have low self esteem, you are likely to be sensitive to criticism and rejection and you probably have difficulty asserting yourself. If you have social anxiety disorder you probably experiences extreme and recurrent episodes of anxiety whenever a social situation arises. You will probably be aware of the intensity and over reaction of your symptoms. You might feel that others will ridicule or judge you because of your reaction. This of course increases your fear of the social occasion you are faced with. You might go to extremes to avoid social situations. If you avoid doing things with other people because you are afraid of embarrassing yourself or people judging you you may suffer from this disorder. If you are terrified of being the center of attention and you avoid or become anxious in social situations where you have to meet or speak to strangers you might have social anxiety disorder. How Do You Fix It? It’s not as difficult as you think. You need to understand that anxiety in all its forms is a function of the way you think. If you understand that your thoughts occur to you – and they are not you. You can progress on the path to healing. Here are some articles that explain this concept in greater detail. Once you understand AND practice being present and aware of your thinking process you can change the thoughts you have in regard to any particular event. This is easy with practice. The key here is you can learn the techniques in minutes but you NEED to practice for weeks. I know this can be done as I have helped many people with different types of anxiety problems from mild nervousness at major events to social anxiety disorder as discussed in this article. The resources to tackle this are available on this web site for fee – other wise – try my “Speed2Enlightenment” online workshop where I can help you through this issue.
The Birth of Modern Yemen An e-book by Brian Whitaker exploring Yemen's political development since unification of north and south in 1990 IT IS MORE than just coincidence that at the time when Communism was collapsing, the two Germanies were re-uniting and new democracies were being born in Eastern Europe, two states at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula embarked on a sweeping transformation of their own, simultaneously unifying and democratising. North and south Yemen had long been a distant outpost of the Cold War, and reverberations from the upheaval in Europe had an impact there, too. The united Republic of Yemen established in May 1990 was a marriage between what, at first glance, seemed unlikely partners. The north, though theoretically in the “capitalist” camp, was one of the world’s poorest countries; a highly traditional Arab-Islamic society, with a strong element of tribalism. The south, on the other hand, partly secularised and partly de-tribalised, had taken the Marxist route. Even poorer than the north, it was one of the Soviet Union’s largest debtors. In some respects the move towards multi-party democracy in Yemen was even more surprising, given the history and inclinations of the two newly-unified states. Inevitably, such radical changes to Yemen’s constitutional and political structure proved far from straightforward, occurring as they did against a background of continuing rivalry between the former regimes of north and south, and in a country where state institutions were often ill-equipped to resist the competing demands of powerful social and political forces. Despite persistent talk of unification long before 1990, these difficulties had led more than a few seasoned observers of Yemeni affairs to believe that it would never happen. When it did, many predicted that unification would fail – and, indeed, their pessimism was not entirely misplaced. A two-month armed conflict four years after unification almost tore the country apart again. Democratisation, meanwhile, was greeted by Yemenis with much initial enthusiasm. In the space of a few months, press freedom and the general openness of political debate reached unprecedented levels. The 1993 parliamentary elections, contested by more than 20 parties, were the first to be held under universal suffrage in the Arabian peninsula. Gradually, however, optimism faded as the limitations of instant democracy became apparent. Since 1993, a succession of parliamentary, presidential and local government elections has not delivered the peaceful rotation of power that is the hallmark of established democracies and President Ali Abdullah Salih’s ruling party, the General People’s Congress, has further consolidated its hegemony over the political scene. THIS BOOK, originally intended as a PhD thesis for Westminster University, was mostly written in the second half of the 1990s but never quite completed. I had to set it aside because of other commitments – regretfully, since I felt it contained a wealth of little-known information about a crucial period in Yemen’s recent history. I continued to be nagged by the thought that I should make it more widely available and finally, in 2009, having in the meantime spent seven years as the Guardian’s Middle East editor and completed two other books, I decided to revise and update it, and publish it online as an e-book. My initial purpose, back in the 1990s, was to examine the simultaneous processes of unification and democratisation in Yemen, and the relationship between them. Why, for instance, did they occur at the same time, and was one essential to the other? Though the two were intimately connected, their relationship was complex. As one Yemeni journalist put it, “Unity brought democracy and democracy did not bring unity.” While it is certainly true that unification could not have proceeded as it did without democratisation, it is also true that democracy, at least in the form practised in Yemen, impeded full-scale integration of the two states for a while, and that subsequent progress towards a fully-fledged democracy has been impeded at times by the demands of national unity. This fluctuating and often unpredictable relationship between national unity and democracy has implications which stretch far beyond Yemen. Numerous other countries are confronted with issues of national unity – Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom are among the more stable ones – and a common response is to look to an extension of democracy, for example through devolution, as a way of resolving them. The results, though, are not always positive. India may be one case where democracy has helped to maintain national unity but in others, such as the former states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, democratisation was accompanied by fragmentation. The Yemeni experience may also hold lessons for north and south Korea, should they ever attempt to unify. Today, with the benefit of hindsight and in the light of subsequent events (notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with confused and bludgeoning efforts by the United States under President George W Bush to promote democracy more generally in the Middle East), Yemen’s democratic experiment raises further questions. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was an attempt to create instant democracy from above – mainly by establishing a system of electoral politics but without most of the other machinery and institutions that are needed if democracy is to flourish. Among other things, democracy requires a state. As Linz and Stepan* put it: “Democracy is a form of governance of a modern state. Thus, without a state, no modern democracy is possible.” Democratisation is rarely a simple matter of replacing a non-democratic system with a democratic one. In Linz and Stepan’s view, a country’s degree of “stateness” (or lack of it) is an important factor in determining how readily it will be able to democratise. Yemen’s problem in this respect was that the government in Sana’a exercised only minimal control over large parts of the country while the state, as a single source of supreme power, continued to face challenges from a variety of quarters. The Yemeni state, in other words, was – and to a considerable extent still is – inadequate for the role that democracy required of it. In the light of this, the events described here – unification, democratisation, armed conflict and its aftermath – may also be considered in the broader context of state-building. That, in turn, raises further questions about the emerging state and its relationship with Yemeni society, in particular: what kind of state should it be? A more highly-developed state can certainly provide better conditions for democracy to flourish but, equally, such a state can help to entrench authoritarian rule. In Yemen, as in many of the Arab countries, it is often difficult to distinguish between “the state” and its leadership, between state-building for its own sake and state-building which is intended mainly to consolidate the power of a ruling elite. Yemen is not the easiest of countries to write about. Although I followed the events of 1990-94 as closely as I could at the time or researched them shortly afterwards, it is sometimes difficult to be sure what really happened. Yemenis themselves often give conflicting accounts, as well as having differences of opinion about their interpretation. In trying to build up a coherent picture I have had to make judgements based on the available facts and the balance of probabilities, also taking into account the likely motivation of sources and background knowledge about “the way things work” in Yemen. In short, it’s an attempt to get as close as I could to the truth of the matter in circumstances where the truth can be rather elusive. One of the advantages of publishing online, however, is that it does not have quite the same finality as print. Readers who wish to dispute anything, correct errors or make general comments are welcome to contact me. My email address is: firstname.lastname@example.org. Brian Whitaker, May 2009 * Linz, Juan and Stepan, Alfred: “Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe”. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. p17. My thanks to the following Yemenis who spared their time for interviews or helped in other ways: Abdullah Said Abaddan, Dr Muhamad al-Afandi, Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, Ismail Ali, Ali Salim al-Baid, Tammam M Bashraheel, Muhammad Salim Basindwah, Abd al-Aziz Abd al-Ghani, Dr Abd al-Kader al-Guneid, Mohamed Hussein al-Haj, Mohammed Hamdal, Naji Abdullah al-Harazi, Abd al-Rahman al-Jifri (jnr), Yahia al-Jifri, Dr Abd al-Karim al-Iryani, Abd al-Rahman al-Iryani, Ahmad al-Kazmi, Abdulla Salem al-Khader, Jarallah Umar al-Kuhali, Ahmad al-Lahabi, Fadl al-Maghafi, Salim Salih Muhammad, Yahya Mutawakkil, Dr Nasir al-Muteiri, Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Saqqaf, Abdel Gader Sayed, Idris A Shammam, Abd al-Malik al-Sindi, Amat al-Alim al-Souswa, Mohamed A al-Yadoumi, Khalid Hussein al-Yamani, Salim Yafai, Assia Yousef. The following non-Yemenis: Professor Fred Halliday, Abdallah Hamouda, Charles Hoots, Patrick Makin, Tony Milroy, Francine Stone, Martin Stone, David Warburton, Eric Watkins, Michael Welton. 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Chemical Science and Engineering News A new organic peroxide molecule, BMPF, prepared by scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), releases fluorescence under mechanical stress and could be incorporated into polymer networks for mechanofunctional design. BMPF-linked polymers are also stable at relatively high temperatures and could pave the way for highly selective and efficient small-molecule-releasing systems with applications in imaging and drug delivery. Polymers make-up everything from the clothes we wear to the plastic we eat off. In recent years, polymers that can release small molecules (like drugs) have been of major interest to pharmaceutical researchers. Previous studies have demonstrated that polymer systems can be modified to release fluorescent molecules when exposed to heat, light, or a change in pH. Now, researchers in the field have focused on "mechanophores," materials that undergo a chemical transformation when placed under mechanical stress. In a new paper published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from Japan have demonstrated the synthesis of a novel organic peroxide mechanophore, bis (9-methylphenyl-9-fluorenyl) peroxide (BMPF), which can be incorporated into a polymer network to release fluorescence. "While there has been little documented research on mechanophores based on organic peroxides so far, our results indicate that BMPF could have excellent potential for application in designing stress-responsive materials," says Professor Hideyuki Otsuka of Tokyo Tech, who led the study. Peroxides occur naturally in the human body as the result of the chemical reactions that take place within it, signifying their important role in new chemical processes. Inspired by this, the team synthesized a "peroxide linker" that could easily dissociate into smaller molecules under mechanical stress. They then ground the compound, BMPF, and observed that the solid not only changed color but also released 9-fluorenone, a fluorescent molecule. They then introduced BMPF into a polymer network and found that it retained its ability to release 9-fluorenone. Moreover, the fluorescence could be induced by either grinding or compression. Additionally, they tested the thermal stability of BMPF cross-linked polymers and found that they could withstand temperatures up to 110°C without decomposition. The team is excited by these findings and their potential to expand the field of peroxide mechanochemistry. "By modifying the current system, we should be able to create other mechanofunctional polymers that can be tuned to release small molecules with special function when exposed to specific stimuli, toward wide-ranging applications in the fields of stress-sensing, imaging, and drug delivery," comments Prof. Otsuka. Some interesting consequences to look forward to! \|Authors :\|\|Yi Lu1, Hajime Sugita2, Koichiro Mikami2, Daisuke Aoki1, and Hideyuki Otsuka1\| \|Title of original paper :\|\|Mechanochemical Reactions of Bis(9-methylphenyl-9-fluorenyl) Peroxides and their Applications in Cross-Linked Polymers\| \|Journal :\|\|Journal of the American Chemical Society\| 1Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology Corresponding author's email: firstname.lastname@example.org School of Materials and Chemical Technology —Encompassing the Disciplines of Science— Information on School of Materials and Chemical Technology inaugurated in April 2016
Risk Factors for Obstructive Sleep Apnea that Orthodontists Might Want to Know Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is an often-undiagnosed and potentially life-threatening condition that affects at least 5% of the population. If we knew that the next mild to moderate Class II teenager we evaluate in our practice is going to develop OSA before the age of 35, would we approach his/her treatment differently? Would we be less likely to offer a camouflage option, and more inclined to encourage absolute correction? The answer is likely to be “yes”. But how do we know? Body mass index (BMI) and mandibular retrusion are clearly associated, but not all people with a Class II malocclusion develop OSA, nor are everyone with OSA necessarily overweight. The etiology of OSA is multi-variable with familial predisposition playing a role. This presentation will look at the environmental, phenotypic and genetic risk factors involved in the development of OSA. Such insight might lead to an improved screening process for individuals at risk of developing OSA and may become part of our diagnostic and treatment planning protocols in orthodontics. Relate important environmental and phenotypic risk factors for obstructive sleep apnea Evaluate genetic indicators that might predispose an individual to OSA Explore a different model for diagnosis and treatment planning of patients at risk for OSA. Airflow Analysis After Maxillomandibular Advancement Surgery in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Patients Maxillomandibular advancement surgery is now considered the most effective surgical treatment option for Obstructive Sleep Apnea. There are few studies showing the airway volume change after Maxillomandibular advancement surgery. Using computational fluid analysis, the pathophysiology of Obstructive Sleep Apnea can be better understood and the effectiveness of maxillomandibular advancement surgery can be evaluated. Relate the pathophysiology and various surgical treatment options for obstructive sleep apnea Evaluate airflow characteristics following maxillomandibular advancement surgery. Airway Implications of Orthodontic Therapy in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Patients Recently, airway size has received a great deal of attention as it directly affects snoring, upper airway resistance syndrome and Obstructive Sleep Apnea. Orthodontists, with their knowledge and training of functional appliances and established skills to evaluate jaw position, are ideally suited to provide oral appliance therapy in this field. Sleep disordered breathing patients are excellent adherents to therapy after only a few nights sleep without interruption and the subsequent restoration of adequate REM sleep. Oral appliances have a direct effect on tongue posture during sleep and help to stabilize the mandible in a closed vertical position. Long term occlusal changes in adults are predominantly dental in nature, typically occur after more than two or three years of nightly wear and continue with time. A better response to appliance therapy is seen in those adult post titration subjects who exhibit a more anterior velopharyngeal wall, a larger radius of curvature of the airway and an increase in velopharyngeal size. A funded clinical trial has been underway for the last three years to develop clinical protocols for the use of oral appliance therapy for sleep disordered breathing in a child population. By evaluating orthodontic records (questionnaires, x-rays and dental study models) together with overnight sleep studies before and after treatment, new applications for oral appliance use and new protocols for therapy in children have been defined. Describe the indications, contraindications, advantages and disadvantages of the currently-available appliances in the field Titrate an adjustable oral appliance to achieve the maximum effectiveness for the treatment of snoring and/or OSA Describe the results of clinical trials designed to compare the effectiveness of specific oral appliances and how they might compare to nasal continuous positive airway pressure or surgical procedures.
Often, efforts toward continuous workplace safety improvement get discarded because of what we prefer to believe about our workforce's fitness for duty, rather than what we actually know about it. The truth is that without an objective way to measure the factors that contribute to improving workplace safety, we can’t determine trend directions and take corrective actions that prevent the factors that reduce productivity and create workplace hazards. We know that fatigue is a leading cause of workplace accidents, yet most companies don’t have active fatigue monitoring and management systems. Workplace Safety Myth #1 We have good scheduling, so we don’t have a fatigue problem. This reasoning exhibits two problems. First, it represents a common issue with the way safety systems are approached, which is reactive. The belief that "we don't have a fatigue problem," is based on thinking that there must be nothing to improve workplace safety until there is a problem. But this means that someone has likely already been placed at risk, if not hurt or killed when a problem is identified. Workplace safety measures should be preventative and proactive, not just in reaction to a discovered problem. Second, not all fatigue is work-related or the result of shift scheduling. Fatigue symptoms come from all sorts of causes, many of which occur when not at work. To assume that shift work is the only cause of worker fatigue is short-sighted and ignores other causes like illness, medications, working in extremely hot or cold conditions, dehydration, insomnia, stress, and so on. Just because a "fatigue problem" has not been noticed doesn't mean that a workforce is immune to fatigue risk. If you employ human beings or even oompa loompas, fatigue risk is real. Workplace Safety Myth #2 We don't have a drug use problem. It is obviously a good thing that a drug problem has yet to be identified. However, this conclusion likely came from traditional drug testing, which is a trailing indicator--in other words, drug test results provide evidence of past conditions, not present or future ones. A more accurate statement might be, "We haven't had many positive drug tests." A lack of positive tests doesn't mean that there will never be any, and it also does not mean that all employees will be drug-free while at work. Many illicit drug users time their drug use according to their workplaces' random testing cycles, so they are able to abstain and clean out their systems before coming eligible for a drug test. Once the cycle has passed, they start using drugs again, knowing they will not be eligible for testing again for a while. Some readers might believe that this doesn't happen at their workplaces, but without a way to test for impairment at the moment, they cannot actually know that it does not. Furthermore, the definition of a "drug use problem" is limited to the substances that traditional workplace drug screens are designed to detect. Therefore, problematic use of drowsiness-inducing or intoxicating prescription or over-the-counter medications may go undetected. Traditional workplace drug screens cannot detect every substance that can impair a worker's cognition or alertness. This is why testing for alertness can better indicate fitness for work and potential workplace safety issues than drug testing. Workplace Safety Myth #3 We don't have a safety problem. As explained above, waiting for a problem to occur before deciding that safety needs attention and improvement is reactionary, not preventative. A safety system based on reacting to problems does a serious disservice to the workforce because improving the system requires a safety incident to occur first. A company should not have to wait for an employee to be hurt or killed to understand where its safety system may need improvement. Just because no problem has been recognized doesn't mean safety issues will never occur. Workplace safety should not simply be reacting to problems, it should be about preventing them and reducing the manifestation of future hazards. A New Way to Think About Workplace Safety All of these assumptions stem from a reactionary approach to safety--because a workplace safety problem has not been so far recognized, it does not exist and never will. Studies and reports from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Safety Council, the American Society of Safety Professionals, as well as other government agencies, scientists, and professional associations around the world, have made it clear that fatigue and impairment risk are real and constant, even in companies that have so far been fortunate enough to avoid an accident. More and more companies worldwide are beginning to realize that the work environment must change with the times, and that excellent safety performance is a constant, conscientious effort. Assessing fatigue in real-time is the only methodology to minimize the impact of fatigue on workplace safety, which can originate from a variety of factors that may or may not be being managed. Additionally, assessing alertness also reduces the risk of other causes of impairment other than fatigue.
Vitamin C: Healthy horses fed adequate amounts of fibre will have the ability to synthesise their own Vitamin C requirement. However, research suggests that supplementation may be beneficial in times of “stress” or where disease is present when the body’s ability to synthesise Vitamin C may be compromised (Marlin et al, 2005). Recent research work has also identified that this vitamin, as well as being an antioxidant, plays a crucial role in the horse’s respiratory health. Being water soluble, Vitamin C is found in very high concentrations in the fluid lining the airways (Deaton et al, 2002). Vitamin C is also actively involved in the recycling or “re-activation” of Vitamin E. It is also involved in general metabolism, iron absorption and anti-stress hormones. For more information see https://www.horslyx.com/respiratory-horslyx-balancer/
A novel method to sort stem cells that could prove quicker, easier and more cost effect than existing methods has been discovered by Scientists at the University Of California, Irvine. This technique may help speed up the future stem cell therapies. This technique, called dielectrophoresis, can be beneficial in future to develop therapies for people with conditions ranging from brain and spinal cord damage to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The study was led by Lisa Flanagan, a stem cell biologist at UCI. This technique makes use of electrodes on a tiny, inch-long glass slide to sort cells according to their electric charges and has been used in cancer research. There's a lack of tools for identifying and sorting cells in the stem cell field. This can prove to be a significant discovery as it could add a new tool to current sorting methods, which generally involve expensive, bulky equipment. "For therapeutic purposes, we want stem cells to turn into specific cell types once they have been transplanted. The trick to doing this is identifying beforehand which cells will become the desired cell type, such as a neuron," said Lisa. She added: "We have discovered a new, potentially better way to do this by focusing on the electric properties of the cells." Dielectrophoresis relies on the fact that different types of cells have different electric properties. For example, the stem cells meant to become neurons, have a different electric charge than stem cells that will become astrocytes, another type of brain cell. It was revealed that the cells respond differently when electric fields are applied. While, at one frequency, a neuron will be attracted to an electrode but an astrocyte will not, and at a different frequency, an astrocyte will be attracted but a neuron will not. It is important to identify and sort stem cells while creating stem cell-based therapies. Stem cell transplantations can cause tumors or be rejected by the body's immune system, if a purification process is not there. The scientists wanted to identify and collect stem cells that were destined to become neurons, which are cells in the brain and spinal cord that process and transmit information. However, neurons that die as a result of injury or disease do not regenerate, which is why people with loss of neurons experience problems like paralysis and memory loss. The scientists thought that stem cell transplantations might be able to restore part of the lost function. UCI engineers made a tiny device using a glass slide to perform the dielectrophoresis in order to identify future neurons, Firstly, scientists positioned unsorted mouse stem cells on one side of the device. The cells then float in sugar water through a tiny channel past electrodes set to a particular frequency. At a definite frequency, stem cells intended to become neurons will stick to the electrodes while other cells pass by. The cells that stick then can be removed and grouped together, potentially for use in a therapy. At present, stem cells are usually separated using a machine called a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS). FACS machines use lasers to detect the light scattering and fluorescent characteristics of the cells, can weigh hundreds of pounds and cost 500,000 dollars or more. The UCI-designed dielectrophoresis device is just a part of the size and cost. The two devices could be used to complement each other in order to create ultra pure stem cell populations. "Once the mold is created, these sorts of devices can cost just pennies to make," said Ed Monuki, senior author and UCI developmental biologist. He added: "You could have many for every member of your lab and it wouldn't be prohibitively expensive." This study appeared online in the journal Stem Cells.
Linear algebra is one of the most important courses and is relevant to nearly all areas of mathematics. In this article, we will be discussing the overall difficulty of linear algebra and the strategies you can employ to do well in this relatively hard course. Linear algebra is a branch of mathematics that is concerned with mathematical structures closed under the operations of addition and scalar multiplication and that includes the theory of systems of linear equations, matrices, determinants, vector spaces, and linear transformations. Is Linear Algebra Hard? Linear algebra is hard. Linear algebra is one of the most difficult courses that most STEM majors will study in university. Linear algebra is not an easy class because it is a very abstract course and it requires strong analytical and logical skills. Linear algebra is considered such a demanding course by STEM majors since it gets exponentially complex and perplexing as the term progresses. Unlike other math courses, linear algebra starts out quite easy but gets almost impossible by the end of the semester. Most math courses you have taken prior to enrolling yourself in linear algebra are not very complex or abstract. Calculus courses for example are not very difficult conceptually and you can do quite well in them as long as you understand the mechanics of what you are doing. Linear algebra is the opposite; the mechanics are quite simple once you understand the challenging core concepts. Linear algebra is a prerequisite for introduction to proofs in most colleges. In turn introduction to proofs is necessary before you can start taking upper-level math courses. Even if you are not pursuing a math major linear algebra is one of the most applicable and relevant courses for engineering, computer science, economics, and many other subjects. Linear algebra has numerous real-life applications since it has the power to reduce a large number of math equations to simpler forms. Your university and the department that teaches linear algebra have a big role in the overall difficulty of the class. Typically higher ranking universities make their courses harder as they have more talented students and it would be unwise to hand out an A grade to every student. Moreover, if you were to take your linear algebra course from a maths department then you can expect it to be quite proof heavy. Regurgitating statements and doing a few practice questions will not be sufficient to pass the course. Instead, you will need to have an in-depth understanding of the subject content. Other departments may make their linear algebra class very applied and practical. Instead of focussing your efforts on proving equations, you will need to divert your energies to finding solutions to problems that mimic the real world. Either way, linear algebra will really test your limits. You will have to constantly practice to do well in the subject. Trying to visualize using online simulators can go a long way in furthering your understanding of the topic. Linear algebra is fundamentally different from most of the math courses you would have taken until now. Linear algebra is not very intuitive and it is often the first real math course students take after enrolling in college. Why is Linear Algebra So Hard? Linear algebra is so hard because it is not very intuitive, it places a strong emphasis on rigorous proofs, and its concepts are very abstract and difficult to visualize. Linear algebra is difficult because it is fundamentally different from most high school and college courses you have taken until now. Linear algebra is renowned for being the first “real” math course. Typically all the math taught before linear algebra can easily be graphed on a sheet of paper. Students have always been taught to visualize functions in terms of graphs. Linear algebra, however, demands students to come to terms with less direct forms of visualization or rely heavily on algebraic manipulations. You must align and modify your thinking of maths to understand the relatively abstract and perplexing material in algebra. What is the Hardest Part in Linear Algebra? The hardest part in linear algebra is defining a mathematical structure via a set of axioms and understanding baffling concepts such as linear independence, eigenvectors, and abstract vector space. Students generally struggle with understanding abstract concepts in linear algebra. Prior to taking linear algebra students are made to focus on calculation rather than understanding the terms and concepts and then carefully assessing which calculation to use. Students are not very good with writing proofs which further enhances the difficulty of linear algebra. Initially, linear algebra is quite straightforward but rapidly becomes very complicated particularly in the second half of the course. Is Linear Algebra a Difficult Class? Linear algebra is certainly a difficult class. You can manage the difficulty you experience in linear algebra by repeatedly practicing the problem sets, furthering your understanding of the topics by reading the textbook, and using simulations to help visualize the ideas covered in class. Is Linear Algebra the Hardest Math Class? Linear algebra is not the hardest math class. Compared to other math courses linear algebra is harder than calculus I and discrete math but similar to calculus II in terms of difficulty. However, linear algebra is easier than most upper-level math courses such as abstract algebra and topology. Is Linear Algebra Harder than Discrete Math? Linear algebra is harder than discrete math. Discrete math is typically a first-year course and is not as abstract or complex as linear algebra. Linear algebra is usually taught in the second year of most STEM majors and requires strong analytical and reasoning skills which makes it harder than discrete math. What level of Math is Linear Algebra? Linear algebra is considered intermediate-level math. Linear algebra is one of the toughest courses along with calculus II that STEM most majors will encounter. However, linear algebra is not a very advanced course since there are several more advanced courses such as abstract algebra and topology. Linear algebra is quite different from most math courses. Customarily you will be expected to study calculus I before embarking your journey of studying linear algebra. Linear algebra is generally a prerequisite to introduction to proofs which in turn is a requirement to study upper level math courses. Thus it makes sense to call linear algebra an intermediate level math course. How long does it take to learn Linear Algebra? It typically takes one semester to learn the basics of linear algebra. If you want to study beyond your course curriculum than it can take much longer. Mastering the more advanced concepts in linear algebra can take years. An undergraduate course in linear algebra will help you learn the basics. However, to learn the advanced concepts in linear algebra you can expect to spend many more semesters studying this wonderful branch of mathematics. Is there Calculus in Linear Algebra? There is almost no calculus in a basic linear algebra undergraduate course. However, as you progress into more advanced mathematics you may find linear algebra problems requiring calculus and vice versa. This interconnection is not only common between linear algebra and calculus but in several other fields of mathematics. For instance you may find calculus concepts in statistics, physics, and economics. Similarly, trigonometry, numerical analysis, optimization, and topology have overlapping ideas. Is Calculus needed for taking Linear Algebra? Universities typically require calculus I before you can take linear algebra. Although linear algebra has almost no calculus concepts; universities want their students to be familiar with basic mathematics before they proceed to take intermediate courses. Is Linear Algebra worth taking? Linear algebra is absolutely worth taking. If you have to choose between linear algebra and any other math course then selecting linear algebra is a no brainer. Linear algebra is one of the most important undergraduate course for STEM majors. Linear algebra is so essential to so many fields. Here are some uses of linear algebra: - Multidimensional Calculus - Differential Geometry - Functional Analysis - Multivariable Statistics - Control Theory and Dynamical Syestems - Optimization Theory - Linear Programming - Computer Graphics - Machine Learning - Multidimensional Stress and Strain - Current and voltage in LCR circuits - Flow in a network of pipes Is Linear Algebra the Most Useful Math? Linear algebra is the most useful math along with calculus when it comes to the math courses taught in college. However, arithmetic, basic algebra, and trigonometry taught in primary, middle, and high school are more useful than linear algebra. Linear algebra is so useful because it has the power to reduce some very complex equations. This is extremely useful because the ideas from linear algebra are basic and easy to understand as compared to the extremely complicated equations it is used to simplify. Is Linear Algebra Different than Algebra? Algebra is a general term and it includes a variety of different forms including elementary algebra, linear algebra, and abstract algebra. Linear algebra focuses on structures that can be described by a system of linear equations. Elementary algebra deals with concepts such as slope of a line, factoring quadratic equations, and solving for a variable. This form of algebra is usually introduced in middle school and taught all the way until high school. Another form of algebra, abstract algebra is only taught to math majors and possibly physics majors. Abstract algebra emphasizes the study of groups, rings, fields, and partial structures such as semigroups and magmas. Abstract algebra involves the use of rules and properties that are not followed by ordinary numbers. Linear algebra is a hard course for most students since it is abstract and counter intuitive. It is unlike most math courses and you must develop techniques to help you visualize what is going on. This adjustment is necessary since most of the math you have studied until now can easily be expressed in a 2-D graph. Overall linear algebra is an extremely useful course and you should try to understand the underlying theory as fully as possible since it has countless practical applications. Although linear algebra does not really require calculus; most colleges expect you to have completed at least one course of calculus so that you have a better understanding of college level mathematics.
"Defining Functions" discusses how you can define functions in the Wolfram Language. In a typical case, you would type in f[x_]=x^2 to define a function f. (Actually, the definitions in "Defining Functions" use the := operator, rather than the = one. "Immediate and Delayed Definitions" explains exactly when to use each of the := and = operators.) The definition f[x_]=x^2 specifies that whenever the Wolfram Language encounters an expression that matches the pattern f[x_], it should replace the expression by x^2. Since the pattern f[x_] matches all expressions of the form f[anything], the definition applies to functions f with any "argument". Function definitions like f[x_]=x^2 can be compared with definitions like f[a]=b for indexed variables discussed in "Making Definitions for Indexed Objects". The definition f[a]=b specifies that whenever the particular expression f[a] occurs, it is to be replaced by b. But the definition says nothing about expressions such as f[y], where f appears with another "index". To define a "function", you need to specify values for expressions of the form f[x], where the argument x can be anything. You can do this by giving a definition for the pattern f[x_], where the pattern object x_ stands for any expression. \|f[x]=value\|\|definition for a specific expression x\| \|f[x_]=value\|\|definition for any expression, referred to as x\| Making definitions for f or f[a] can be thought of as being like giving values to various elements of an "array" named f. Making a definition for f[x_] is like giving a value for a set of "array elements" with arbitrary "indices". In fact, you can actually think of any function as being like an array with an arbitrarily variable index. In mathematical terms, you can think of f as a mapping. When you define values for, say, f and f, you specify the image of this mapping for various discrete points in its domain. Defining a value for f[x_] specifies the image of f on a continuum of points. The Wolfram Language allows you to define transformation rules for any expression or pattern. You can mix definitions for specific expressions such as f or f[a] with definitions for patterns such as f[x_]. Many kinds of mathematical functions can be set up by mixing specific and general definitions in the Wolfram Language. As an example, consider the factorial function. This particular function is in fact built into the Wolfram Language (it is written n!). But you can use Wolfram Language definitions to set up the function for yourself. The standard mathematical definition for the factorial function can be entered almost directly into the Wolfram Language, in the form f[n_]:=n f[n-1];f=1. This definition specifies that for any n, f[n] should be replaced by n f[n-1], except that when n is 1, f should simply be replaced by 1.
Published on January 31st, 2019 \| by Steve Hanley0 If The Earth Is Warming, Why Is It So Cold In Chicago? Let Us Explain January 31st, 2019 by Steve Hanley As young activists gather in cities around the world to demand political leaders take meaningful steps to curb global warming, weather, forecasters are predicting in will be warmer today in Antarctica than in Chicago. The record cold temperatures have prompted the alleged leader of the free world to tweet America could use some good old fashioned “global waming.” Thanks, Donald. Good to know you are so well informed. Weather And Climate Are Not The Same Thing The thing The Donald is incapable of comprehending is that weather and climate are two separate and distinct things. Weather is what happens over a period of days or months. Climate is what happens over a period of years, decades, or even centuries. Perhaps an analogy will help. Imagine the average number of home runs hit in a major league baseball game increases in 2019. Does that mean every player in the league will hit more home runs? No. For some, the number of home runs they hit may go down. For others, it may go up. But overall, the average will rise. Denying the evidence of the upward trend because one player has a lousy season demonstrates nothing but a poor understanding of statistics. While it may seem counter-intuitive that the Earth is getting warmer while some areas are experiencing colder temperatures, this is exactly what climate scientists have been predicting for years. Some parts of the world will get wetter, others will get drier. Some will get hotter, some will get colder. Forest fires will become more intense and more frequent. The same thing will happen with regard to hurricanes and typhoons. The words “climate change” are remarkably accurate. A warmer planet will lead to changes in climate, the scientific community suggests, and that is exactly what is happening. The culprit in the current surge of cold air flooding down from the Arctic is what climate scientists call the “polar vortex,” the upper atmosphere cyclonic winds that circulate around the area at the top of the world. Loss of sea ice may be responsible for a breakdown in the circulation pattern of those winds, allowing them to escape the Arctic and sweep down across Canada and into the Midwestern states. As the New York Times explains it, “The term [polar vortex] refers to circular bands of winds near the poles that are strongest in wintertime and well above the jet stream in the stratosphere. The stratosphere is an atmospheric layer that extends roughly seven to 31 miles above the earth. “Usually, those circular bands act as walls that keep the teeth-chattering cold air locked at the poles. But, every so often, the winds break down and allow the cold air to escape. That’s what happened at the beginning of January, when the polar vortex split into three separate bands.” See the graphic below by Zax Lawrence, a PhD candidate in the Physics department at New Mexico Tech, and an affiliate of NASA, JPL, and NorthWest Research Associates. — Zac Lawrence (@zd1awrence) January 14, 2019 A 2009 study published by Geophysical Research Letters found there were as many record lows as record highs in the US in the 50s. But today there are twice as many record high temperature events than cold temperature records. There may still be record cold periods but they are occurring less frequently, reports the New York Times. A Money Guy Explains The Concept Of Risk The alleged president may pooh pooh all this talk of climate change but Bob Litterman, a founding partner and chairman of the risk committee of Kepos Capital does not. Litterman was previously the head of risk management at Goldman Sachs and is on the board of the Climate Leadership Council, the sponsor of the Baker-Shultz carbon dividend plan. After the announcement this week that Pacific Gas & Electric is filing bankruptcy as a result of its liability for a number of deadly wildfires in California, he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times listing the financial risks the business community is facing from climate change. “Utilities aren’t alone in facing climate threats. For transportation companies, for example, it may require hardening infrastructure like port facilities or rail lines to protect them from floods or fires. Fossil fuel companies may be forced to deal with stranded assets like oil fields and coal seams that have been bought but won’t be developed as society moves away from coal and oil. “For society at large, and the government in particular, the most important and urgent action required is to minimize future warming by creating appropriate global incentives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Economists generally agree that rather than regulate behavior, it is more effective to allow individuals to choose their actions, as long as the prices appropriately reflect the costs, including the risks posed by climate change. “To date prices of energy have not reflected the risk of future climate damages. This is a stupid mistake and has resulted in too much climate risk. Not pricing climate risk is a bug in the tax code. It can be easily and quickly fixed.” “But time is not on our side. Even if we take immediate action now to appropriately price emissions, it will take decades to reach a net carbon neutral world, and in the meantime the planet will continue warming. So we’ll also need to harden infrastructure, change building codes, protect fragile ecosystems and make farming and lifestyle choices that are compatible with the climate changes that will be occurring around us. We will also need to confront the very unequal impacts on people in this country and around the planet. “And while sadly these actions are all costs that will grow over time, the unfortunate reality is that the longer we wait to act, the greater the bill will be.” One would presume that a former risk manager for Goldman Sachs and founder of an investment company is a Republican. Yet here he is urging passage of a carbon tax and worrying about “unequal impacts on people in this country and around the planet. If only more of his Republican peers were as perceptive and concerned about their fellow human beings.
Bluetooth innovation is a low-power, minimal expense remote innovation for short-range radio correspondence between different fixed as well as versatile electronic gadgets like cell phones, workstations, PDAs, vehicles, sound system headsets, MP3s, computerized cameras, laptops and PC peripherals. Bluetooth additionally alludes to the standard correspondence convention (IEEE 802.15.1) explicitly intended for this sort of short-range remote correspondence. The center of Bluetooth innovation lies in ble module a minimal expense 9 mm x 9 mm central processor that capabilities as a short-range radio connection when embedded into an electronic gadget, making the gadget Bluetooth-empowered. Remote correspondence between different bluetooth-empowered gadgets happens through these radio connections, rather than by means of links as utilized in ordinary systems administration. Since Bluetooth innovation utilizes radio transmissions, which are omni-directional and can be sent through walls and different obstructions, Bluetooth-empowered gadgets needn’t bother with to be in view or be pointing at one another. Bluetooth radio modules work in the open, unlicensed ISM (modern logical clinical) spread-range 2.4 GHz recurrence band, isolated into 79 channels isolated by 1 MHz each. To stay away from impedance from different signs, the Bluetooth signal jumps to another channel each time it communicates or gets an information bundle, making Bluetooth association vigorous and secure. The correspondence scope of Bluetooth innovation shifts from 1 m to 100 m, contingent on the greatest power allowed (1 mW to 100 mW). As a result of this channel jumping, there ought not be a reliable issue with different gadgets utilizing the 2.4 Ghz recurrence band, like old cordless telephones. Each Bluetooth-empowered gadget can all the while speak with up to seven different gadgets inside a solitary individual region organization, called a piconet. Every gadget can at the same time have a place with a few piconets. Every gadget haggles with one another by means of a characterized gadget name so every gadget can monitor who it is speaking with. The gadget name to utilize when you are setting up your Bluetooth gadget is commonly cleared expressed in the going with gadget documentation. Bluetooth innovation offers worked in security with 128-cycle encryption and PIN code validation. At the point when Bluetooth items distinguish themselves, they utilize the PIN code whenever they first interface, from there on remaining safely associated. Pragmatic Utilizations of Bluetooth Systems administration A portion of the famous utilizations of Bluetooth innovation are in remote systems administration between a cell phone and a PC/work area, between a cell phone and a without hands headset, between laptops in a confined space and between the info and result gadgets of a PC (e.g., mouse, console, printer). Bluetooth innovation can likewise be utilized to move records, pictures and MP3 documents between cell phones or between MP3 players/computerized cameras and PCs.
30 Teaching Tips #1: For the Beginning of the Semester Make the first day count. Discuss a core idea, pose a typical problem, or ask students to complete a group exercise. By moving into the course material, you're telling students that the course is well organized, well paced and worthwhile. Use e-mail to enhance class participation. Provide a tutor in the first week to help students learn how to use the computers. To get the discussion started, ask students to generate comments or questions for discussion. Electronic conversations increase student participation, encourage collaboration, and require critical thinking. Take five minutes at the end of each class to ask students to summarize the ideas presented, to solve a sample problem, to apply information to a new situation or to write their reactions to the day's class. Doing so throughout the semester can help you know what you can do to strengthen your teaching. Both positive and negative comments can stimulate learning, but positive comments seem to be most effective. At least, don't give only negative feedback. Praise what the student has done right. It builds self-confidence. Recognize sincere effort even if the product is not the greatest. Take a moment after every class and give yourself a grade for participation. Ask yourself these questions: How open are you to your students? How do you encourage them to get involved? Do you let students know you appreciate their participation? Sometimes we can be defeated by our reaction to students' participation. Remember: student participation depends on teacher participation. Having trouble getting your students to read? Send them on a treasure hunt. Chose several sections of text and ask students to find the most important point, idea, argument or example. Have them write it down with a brief sentence justifying their selection. You can increase understanding and participation immediately. Instead of the usual "teacher questions, students answer," try the reverse. "Turning the table" provides a refreshing change of pace. Keep a journal on your class. After each class session jot down names of students who spoke up, who responded to whose points and the kinds of questions that generated the most lively exchange. Use this information to prepare future sessions. Use Blackboard to add another dimension to class participation. To get the discussion started ask students to generate comments or questions and post them on the discussion board between courses. Participate in online discussion with students. Whether you're using overhead transparencies or computer presentation software, here are some tips to help you "get your point across." Give an attractive, forceful title to your presentation. Summarize your points. Avoid the use of complete sentences. Use boldface or italic type instead of underlining. Use color sparingly. Check expectations of students early in the course to avoid problems later. What do they hope to gain from the course? Use a questionnaire, a short discussion, or both. Follow up by clarifying matters of prerequisites, objectives, assignments and presentation style. Be aware of your teaching philosophy and behavior. "Good" teachers come in a vast array of styles. Resources in the Office of Graduate Studies can help you determine your teaching philosophy. Examine your strengths and weaknesses and polish up your own teaching style. Around mid-term ask for feedback on instruction. Do students feel they are learning? What might be done to improve their learning? The Office of Graduate Studies has a computer-scored questionnaire called Teaching Analysis by Students (TABS) which many instructors use for this kind of information. When presenting materials, break up a series of declarative statements with questions designed to prod thinking. Pose a significant question at the beginning of the class period that will be answered at the end. Give a paradox or a puzzle for the class to solve by application of information given in lecture or format. If you wish to make use of an innovative approach to teaching, it's important to pilot test at least a segment of the materials or the strategy with real students. Work on a unit of a course you're currently teaching or do some microteaching with videotape feedback. Contact the Office of Graduate Studies for help in designing, implementing and evaluating your innovation. Prepare students to take tests. Indicate how your tests will be scored and weighed; describe the format (multiple choice, true/false, short answer essay, etc.). Give a test in the first week or two to demonstrate your style of examination or give sample questions and practice quizzes for students to work on in recitation in study groups, or on their own. In discussion ask a variety of questions from recall and comprehension to those requiring application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Reinforce student responses by paraphrasing, building on their ideas, asking for further reaction, giving nonverbal cues, etc. Wait for students to answer. Ask "real" questions, use "does anyone have any questions?" sparingly. Vary your daily presentation. One way communication holds your audience's attention for about 20 minutes. Vary what you do (talk, listen, move about, use materials, etc.) and what your students are asked to do (talk, listen, move about, use materials, etc.). Help your students to form study groups. Describe the purpose of the study groups, the nature of the work to be done there, and the responsibilities of each member. At first, give specific assignments to provide structure and guidance. Check periodically to see how the groups are working by reviewing assignments or by asking members to submit minutes of their meetings. Following a short writing activity focused on some question/issue raised by the lecture, have students compare/contrast responses. A variation is for students to reformulate a group answer to the questions, and then each member explains the groups' answer and reasoning to a member of another group. Gain immediate feedback about whether or not students grasp the primary ideas presented. Have students write a "one-minute paper" asking 1) What is the major point you learned in class today? And 2) What is the main unanswered question you leave class with today? To lessen students' uneasiness about losing points, grade with a green pen instead of red. It emphasizes that their errors are corrections rather than failures. How adequately do your tests sample the objectives? Keep track by constructing a grid listing your objectives along the side of the page and the content areas along the top. Then, tally the test items as to the objective and content they cover. Help your students take and use notes more effectively. Show them the organization of your lecture — write an outline on the board. Students usually record whatever is put on the board, so be discriminating in use of the board or overheads. Tell students what is important. Use signaling phrases like "this is important" or "these differ in three ways." Encourage your students to review their notes, organize them, fill in gaps by using the text and identify the points they don't completely understand. These tips not only help students become more effective "notetakers" they also help students to think more deeply about the lecture content. Allow students 5-10 seconds to answer questions. If no one responds, rephrase, repeat or simplify the question and wait an additional 5-10 seconds. Research shows that additional wait time increases the number and quality of responses from students. Include review questions for each class period in your syllabus or make them available to students before each class meeting. Ask students to write questions on the board at the beginning of class. Use these questions to start your discussion. Students will be encouraged to do the reading and be more engaged during class. When a student asks a question, look to the rest of the class to respond. This technique produces greater interactions among students. Misconceptions in students' thinking can also be addressed at this time. Give everyone a chance to participate. Ask each student to say one thing about the reading and no one can interrupt. After everyone has a turn, open the discussion to the entire class. This technique works best with courses that meet for more than one hour. There are several easy ways to keep your students motivated throughout the semester. Be available for questions before and after class, show enthusiasm in the topics, return assignments in a reasonable amount of time and have a plan for every class. Your students will be more motivated if you show commitment to their learning.
A new cell screening method that can be used to identify potential anti-influenza drugs has been developed by the Medical Systems Virology group at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki and its national and international collaborators. The researchers were able to identify two novel compounds with anti-influenza activity, obatoclax and gemcitabine and prove the efficacy of a previously known drug saliphenylhalamide. The study was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and is now available online. Influenza viruses cause significant human morbidity and mortality. To treat the infections, different virus-directed drugs have been developed. However, the currently available drugs are targeting viral proteins and due to a high mutation rate the influenza viruses quickly develop resistance to them. For that reason, next-generation antiviral drugs should be directed towards the host functions. The results of this study provide a foundation for development of next-generation antiviral drugs. Furthermore, these identified compounds can be used as chemical tools when studying the molecular mechanisms of virus-host interactions. "An interesting aspect of this study is that the antiviral effects of obatoclax, saliphenylhalamide and gemcitabine, which all are either investigational or approved anticancer agents, are achieved at much lower concentrations than that needed to mediate cancer cell death" said the group leader Denis Kainov. However, further research is still needed before these drugs can be clinically tested and applied in influenza infections. This research project is a good example of repurposing of drugs, i.e. finding new applications for existing drugs and thus saving money and time on drug development. "We anticipate that these types of drugs could in the future reinforce the therapeutic arsenal and address the needs of the society to control influenza outbreaks", said Olli Kallioniemi, the Director of FIMM.
Medieval England was full of books, many times the number that have survived. The great moment of loss was when the country’s religious houses were suppressed by King Henry VIII and their libraries scattered and destroyed. Twentieth-century scholarship has been enterprising in establishing what survives and in discovering what libraries once held. To understand that evidence, and to be able to reconstruct the transmission of culture in the Middle Ages, we need to employ with care the evidence of the surviving books and what medieval library catalogues can tell us about these lost collections. Libraries and Books in Medieval England paints a new picture of the circulation of books, from the totality of the available evidence. It seeks to move away from the modern conceptualization of the monastic library as the only venue for medieval book provision, and to broaden awareness of the wider book economy, including private ownership and the birth of the book trade. The result, by one of the country’s leading experts and based on his Lyell Lectures in the University of Oxford, is an unparalleled work offering a new view of the field. RICHARD SHARPE (1954 – 2020) was Professor of Diplomatic in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Wadham College. As well as being one of the country’s leading experts on medieval books and libraries, he was also a foremost critic and editor of medieval Latin texts and charters. For thirty years he had the oversight of a monumental series, the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, which aims to gather, print and interpret the scattered documentary evidence for book ownership in the middle ages. JAMES WILLOUGHBY is Research Fellow in Medieval History at New College, Oxford New College, Oxford, and a long-term collaborator of Professor Sharpe's. - ISBN 9781851246014 - 192 pages 234 x 156 mm - Published April 2023
In this article View / Download pdf version of this article Low health literacy contributes significantly to health disparities for Māori and Pacific peoples. However, the majority of adult New Zealanders have low health literacy. This has wide ranging implications for people's well being and the provision of health services. Improving health literacy is about more than enhancing the readability of information. It is about building the skills and knowledge of individuals, whānau and communities so that they can evaluate, synthesise and act on the information they receive, to improve their health outcomes. Why does health literacy matter? More than half of adults in New Zealand have low health literacy, and they are: - Less likely to use preventative services - Less likely to recognise the first signs of medical problems - Less likely to effectively manage their long-term condition - Less likely to communicate concerns to health professionals - More likely to be hospitalised due to a chronic condition - More likely to use emergency services - More vulnerable to workplace injury What is health literacy? Health literacy is the interaction between the skills and knowledge of individuals and the demands of the health system.1 In many health settings there is a significant mismatch between the skills and knowledge people need in order to meet the health literacy demands they face, and their actual health literacy skills and knowledge. In New Zealand, good health literacy has been defined as: "the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services in order to make informed and appropriate health decisions".2 There are three aspects to this definition. Firstly, a person or family has to get the information they need. Secondly, they need to understand the information and decide if it is accurate and sufficient. And finally, they need to act on the information. Patients not acting on information is most commonly cited by health professionals as evidence of non-adherence. But it is equally important to check what happened at the other two stages. Health professionals need to provide clear, consistent and relevant information and services, where, how and when people need them, and assist people to understand the information and services as required. People's health literacy skills and knowledge are influenced by: - Familiarity with the health topic and the system - Available time and resources - Confidence levels - Attitudes, values and beliefs The literacy and numeracy demands of the health system are influenced by: - How services are designed and delivered - Organisational and funding processes - The complexity of the health issue - The communication skills of the health workforce - The complexity of oral and written communication used, e.g. instructions, information, forms, letters, publications, websites, labels Low health literacy should not be confused with low intelligence. Health care systems are increasing in complexity with a wider range of providers. People are required to be more self-managing, develop new skills to find and manage information, understand and manage their rights and responsibilities and make health decisions for themselves and others. Health literacy involves: - Understanding how to navigate and interact with the complex health system - Understanding what health information is relevant and how to find it - Developing knowledge and expectations about health and well-being - Evaluating and understanding health messages, nutrition information, instructions and medicine labels - Completing medical forms and responding to information requests - The confidence and ability to talk with health professionals and ask questions People can have ongoing health literacy needs or episodic health literacy needs. People who have low health literacy will have ongoing difficulties in making informed health decisions, but most people will at some point in their lives experience an episode of low health literacy. Even highly skilled individuals may find the health system too complicated to understand, especially when these individuals are made more vulnerable by poor health. When a person is diagnosed with a new condition it will take some time to understand the condition, how it is affecting them and what to do about it. It may also require people to prepare for and undergo unfamiliar tests, take new medicines, find clinics and interact with new health professionals. Often people are expected to listen to and read new information, understand and use new vocabulary, speak to new people about new things and monitor results or perform calculations. This is likely to come at a time when people are already feeling ill and stressed. What can health professionals do about health literacy? Health literacy is about more than improving the readability of information and the information flow between the public, health professional and the health system. Health literacy is about building the skills and knowledge of individuals, whānau and communities so that they can evaluate and synthesise the information they receive from the health system and others, decide whether they have enough information, and act on the information. This concept of health literacy relies significantly on health professionals, health organisations and the health system not just providing the information but actively building the health literacy skills and knowledge of individuals, whānau and communities. The health literacy "problem" is not just the responsibility of the patient. The greatest opportunity for the health sector is to reduce the health system's literacy demands and complexity and to improve the health workforce's communication skills. How to reduce health literacy demands Reducing health literacy demands does not mean "dumbing down" or reducing information. In some cases it may result in more, rather than less, information being shared with patients. Health literacy demands can be reduced by: - Making it easier for patients to navigate health services, systems and processes - Encouraging health conversations and helping people to identify and ask questions - Finding out what people know as the starting point of any health conversation - Tailoring the conversation to take into account what they already know - Making the amount of information or instructions passed on manageable for the patient and their whānau - Checking that you have been clear when talking to a patient by asking them to "teach-back" - Encouraging whānau involvement in health conversations - Going through written information with patients and whānau rather than handing it out to be read later - Making medication and treatment information clearer - Following up and monitoring prescribed medicines and instructions - Redesigning health education resources, letters and forms so they are clear to the audience Health literacy statistics in New Zealand The most recent Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALLS)* carried out in 2006, showed that more than half (56.2%) of New Zealand adults have poor health literacy skills. These results are similar to those of Australia, Canada and the United States, which participated in these literacy surveys along with many other OECD countries. Health literacy skills were measured on a scale of one (very low skills) to five (very high skills). Health literacy skills at level three are considered necessary to cope with the demands of everyday health situations. Only 43% of New Zealand adults have good health literacy, that is, level three and above. This means more than 1.6 million adults in New Zealand have health literacy skills at levels one and two and are limited in their ability to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services in order to make informed and appropriate health decisions. Elderly people, people with limited education, people with limited income and people with limited language proficiency often have lower health literacy. Māori have much lower health literacy levels than non-Māori, regardless of other demographic factors such as age, gender, income and educational status. However, European New Zealanders comprise the largest group with low health literacy in New Zealand. * Available from: www.educationcounts.govt.nz Health literacy is not just providing the information but actively building the health literacy skills and knowledge of individuals, whānau and communities How to develop peoples' health literacy skills Every interaction between a patient, whānau and a health professional provides an opportunity to develop people's health literacy knowledge and skills. For example, a health conversation can be used to check and build understanding about: - A health condition - Essential health terminology - Each aspect of a health process - Who can provide support and advice Most people with low health literacy do not know they have an issue and if they do, they are unlikely to reveal the problem. In many situations it is not possible to know what information has previously been provided to a patient and whānau, what is already understood, or what barriers exist for the patient and whānau in relation to acting on information. Sometimes health professionals may know when a patient has health literacy needs because someone has helped them to fill in forms or understand appointment letters. However, in most cases it will be difficult to readily determine a patient's health literacy skills. Taking a Universal Precautions approach to health literacy means providing good clear communication (both written and spoken) to all patients and whānau. This approach maintains the mana of the patient and whānau and, when done effectively, benefits all patients and whānau, not just those with low health literacy. Resources can help to develop health literacy skills and knowledge by including concepts, vocabulary, activities, and information that build on people's existing knowledge and help them to develop the necessary skills and knowledge for understanding and managing their health. For example, someone newly diagnosed with high cholesterol may benefit from a resource that helps them: - Understand and correctly pronounce new vocabulary about cholesterol - Learn enough about cholesterol to understand what health professionals are asking them to do, and why - Plan questions to ask health professionals - Get support to ask questions and manage their treatment Written resources to develop health literacy skills and knowledge need to go beyond a "plain language" approach and need to be developed in conjunction with the people using the information, to ensure the resources provide the information people need and want, in an accessible way. Improving health literacy means people will be better able to take care of their health and engage with the health system. For health professionals, better health literacy will lead to improved patient interactions, and better health outcomes. - Fakamalolo ke he tau amaamanakiaga, ke mafola ai e tau matakainaga Strengthen all endeavours and the community will benefit – NIUE - Toko rangatiratanga na te mana-matauranga Knowledge and power set me free – MĀORI - Prescription to End Confusion, Institute of Medicine, 2004 - Kōrero Mārama, Ministry of Health, 2010
A few miles from Lake Superior, near the Caribou Trail, members of a tree-planting crew seem to hit rock wherever they aim their long-bladed hoedads. "We're just trying to find soil in between all these nice rocks, where the roots of these little oak trees are going to be able to grow down and survive," crew leader Kira Reoh said. Reoh's crew is planting little red oaks on land in the Superior National Forest that has long largely supported the spruce, pine, birch and aspen trees typical to the northlands. They're planting trees that should do well as the climate continues to change in Minnesota's north woods. As growing seasons become longer and winters are warmer, researchers are seeing more southerly tree species creeping northward into the boreal forest. They're worried about what climate change could mean for the existing ecosystem, and they are predicting big changes that could make the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness more like southern Minnesota or Iowa by the end of the century. Planting such trees slightly outside of their current range may help ensure that the forest can continue to provide the like clean water, wildlife habitat, wood products and recreational opportunities that Minnesotans have come to depend on, said Mark White, a forest ecologist for the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group that is spearheading the experiment. "If we just let things go, there's the possibility they'll start to lose those functions as we have these boreal species decreasing and we don't have other things that can take their place," White said. "We're in danger of losing some of those things that we value from forests." White and his team are using seedlings from areas west and south of the Northland to create greater genetic diversity. In the next two years, they'll plant 60,000 trees during the experiment, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation and the Minnesota Outdoor Heritage Fund. Over the next few years, the team will measure the survival and growth of the red oaks and share the results with other natural resource managers. Minnesota is at high risk for climate-related changes partly because it marks the border of three major natural systems: tallgrass prairie, eastern forest and coniferous forest. The transition zones are expected to see huge changes as the climate warms and rainfall becomes more erratic. That could spark a suite of other dangers, among them more fires, insect pests, diseases, and invasive weeds — all of which put natural systems at greater risk. DNR IS CAUTIOUS In the last couple of years, officials at the state Department of Natural Resources have begun factoring climate change into their forest planning. The agency will watch the Nature Conservancy experiment with great interest, said DNR forester Paul Dubuque, a member of a climate adaptation team. Meanwhile, the agency is taking a more cautious approach. "If we were to retool our nurseries to produce, say, more red oak species, and we made major efforts to plant red oak in areas where we haven't normally seen it develop, there's some uncertainty to that," Dubuque said. "There's a bit of a risk to that." If the trees don't thrive, he said, the DNR would have lost its investment of time and resources. "However, I would say that a lot of our forest management plans really try to get at managing the forest for a mixed composition, making them more resilient to these potential changes in climate," Dubuque said. Toward that end, Dubuque and his team developed a list of 40 different strategies to deal with climate change, which they will present to foresters around the state later this summer. They also added climate change factors to a tree planting guide that foresters use to help them decide what trees to plant where. The greater variety of trees on a landscape, they say, the more likely that some of them will benefit from climate change and will help create a healthy forest. The DNR relies on the forest industry to help keep forests healthy. Most logging is done in winter, and winters are getting shorter. Experts agree the industry will need to adapt and find ways to use the trees that do well as the climate warms. Some hope that biomass — burning trees for heat or electricity — will be one answer. BWCAW IN FOR CHANGES Although many people likely would find if difficult to picture a Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness that looks like southern Minnesota, such changes are part of the broad sweep of nature, said Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Forest Ecology. He said over thousands of years the boreal forest in northern Minnesota has moved from Hudson's Bay to Tennessee and back a dozen times. "It resides in Minnesota for a few thousand years each way as it migrates north and south, and we take that to be normal," he said. "But actually northern Minnesota has been under a mile of ice much more often than it's had boreal forest. It's also had prairie. So this has happened before and it will happen again." The difference now is the speed of the change and the frequency of extreme weather events such as the 1999 blowdown, when high winds toppled thousands of trees. Some models predict more intense changes will come around the middle of this century, 40 to 50 years from now. Frelich said the best thing to do would be to cut carbon emissions to reduce the degree of climate change. He said it will be a lot easier for everyone — trees, forests and people — to adapt to a warmer climate than to a hotter one. This 2011 report from the DNR's Climate and Renewable Energy Steering Team includes maps and other detailed information about what the state, industry and environmental groups doing to prepare for the warming climate.
A report coauthored by NIEHS epidemiologist Chandra Jackson could lead to better sleep health for disadvantaged groups. A report published Mar. 10 in the journal Sleep gathered recommendations from a 2018 workshop titled “The Role of Sleep in Health Disparities: Causes and Health Consequences.” Chandra Jackson, Ph.D., co-chaired the meeting and is the report’s first author. She studies sleep health disparities (SHDs) in the NIEHS Social and Environmental Determinants of Health Equity Group. The two-day event was organized by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. Experts in health disparities and sleep met to share insights from their respective fields and identify research gaps. They made recommendations for future studies and interventions related to sleep health disparities. Read more about JPB Fellow Chandra Jackson’s research.
It can be deduced from the literal meaning of this word that the Jinn is an entity that is invisible; numerous characteristics of this being are mentioned in the Qur’an, such as: 1. It is an entity that has been created from the flames of fire, unlike man, who has been created from earth:1 وَ خَلَقَ الْجَآنَّ مِنْ مَارِجٍ مِنْ نَارٍ 2. Possesses knowledge, perception, the faculty of logic, the power of reasoning, and can distinguish between truth and falsehood (various verses of Suratul Jinn). 3. Possesses (religious) obligations and responsibilities (verses of Suratul Jinn and al-Waqi'ah). 4. Some of them are believers while others are disbelievers: وَ أَنَّا مِنَّا الصَّالِحُونَ وَ مِنَّا دُونَ ذٌلِكَ… “There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary…”2 5. They shall be resurrected: وَ أَمَّا الْقَاسِطُونَ فَكَانُوا لِجَهَنَّمَ حَطَباً “And as to the deviators, they are fuel of hell.”3 6. They initially possessed the power to penetrate into the skies, eavesdrop and procure news but were later prohibited: وَ أَنَّا كُنَّا نَقْعُدُ مِنْهَا مَقَاعِدَ لِلسَّمْعِ فَمَنْ يَسْتَمِعِ الآنَ يَجِدْ لَهُ شِهَاباً رَصَداً “And that we used to sit in some of the sitting-places thereof to steal a hearing, but, he who would (try to) listen now would find a flame lying in wait for him.”4 7. They used to establish contact with some of the people and, by means of the limited knowledge of the Unseen that they possessed, endeavoured to misguide the people: وَ أَنَّهُ كَانَ رِجَــالٌ مِنَ الإِِنْسِ يَعُوذُونَ بِرِجَالٍ مِنَ الْجِنِّ فَزَادُوهُمْ رَهَقاً “And that persons from among men used to seek refuge with persons from among jinn, so they increased them in wrongdoing.”5 8. From amongst them there are those who, like some humans, possess great powers: قَالَ عِفْرِيتٌ مِنَ الْجِنِّ أَنَا آتِيكَ بِهِ قَبْلَ أَنْ تَقُومَ مِنْ مَقَامِكَ “One audacious among the jinn said: I will bring it to you before you rise up from your place; and most surely I am strong (and) trusty for it.”6 9. They possess the power to perform some of the tasks that are required by man: وَ مِنَ الْجِنِّ مَنْ يَعْمَلُ بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ بِإِذْنِ رَبِّهِ وَ مَنْ يَزِغْ مِنْهُمْ عَنْ أَمْرِنَا نُذِقْهُ مِنْ عَذَابِ السَّعِيرِ يَعْمَلُونَ لَهُ مَا يَشَآءُ مِنْ مَحَارِيبَ وَ تَمَاثِيلَ وَ جِفَانٍ كَالْجَوَابِ “And of the jinn there were those who worked before him by the command of his Lord; and whoever turned aside from Our command from among them, We made him taste of the punishment of burning. They made for him what he pleased of fortresses and images, and bowls (large) as watering-troughs and cooking-pots that will not move from their place.”7 10. Their creation on the earth was prior to man's creation: وَ الْجَآنَّ خَلَقْنَاهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ مِنْ نَّارِ السَّمُوْمِ “And the jinn We created before, of intensely hot fire.”8 In addition, it can be clearly inferred from the verses of the Noble Qur’an that, contrary to what is popular amongst the common masses, humans are a species superior to them. This can be concluded by the fact that all the divine prophets had been chosen from the humans; moreover, many jinn too had believed in the Noble Prophet (S) - who was a human - and pledged allegiance to him. Additionally, the obligation upon the Shaytan of prostrating before Adam at a time when he (the Shaytan), according to the explicit statements of the Qur’an, had been of the elders of the Jinn9, further reinforces this idea of superiority. The discussion thus far has revolved around the aspects that can be inferred about this invisible entity from the Noble Qur’an, which is devoid of all superstitions and non-scientific issues. However, we do know that the general and the unaware masses have concocted great superstitions about this entity which neither conforms with logic nor intellect, and consequently have imparted an irrational appearance to this being such that whenever the word 'jinn' is uttered, a handful of strange ideas immediately come to mind - entities possessing dreadful appearances, who have horns and tails, are harmful, troublesome, malicious and ill-mannered, who can set a house on fire by pouring a cauldron of boiling water in one corner of the house! These are examples of such fanciful and superstitious beliefs! If our perspective of the existence of jinn is purified from such superstitions, the main issue is totally acceptable for, there exists no reasoning to restrict living entities to only those that can be seen by us. On the contrary, scholars of natural sciences state: The entities that man can perceive by means of his senses are marginal in comparison to those that cannot be perceived by means of them. Prior to the discovery of microscopic organisms, no one would have believed that in one drop of water or blood, there existed hundreds of thousands of living entities that man could not see. The scientists also state: Our eyes can perceive a limited (range of) colours and our ears can hear a limited (range of) sound waves; the colours and sounds that cannot be perceived by means of our eyes and ears are more numerous than those that can be perceived by them. When the state of the world is such, why should the existence of a species of living entities, whom we cannot perceive by means of our senses, be so fantastic and astonishing? And why should we not accept it when we have been informed of it by a truthful informer like the Noble Prophet (S)? In any event, on the one hand, the Qur’an has informed us of the existence of the jinn possessing the aforementioned characteristics; while on the other hand, there exists no rational proofs which deny the existence of such an entity. Accordingly, we ought to accept their existence but simultaneously disregard the inappropriate superstitions of the general public in connection with these beings. It is important to note that at times, the term jinn is used in a more expansive meaning - one that tends to encompass a number of invisible entities, irrespective of whether they possess intellect and perception or not. In this expanded meaning of the word, even animals that are not seen by the eyes, usually remaining hidden in their lairs, are included. This is proved by a tradition of the Commander of the Faithful (a.s.) wherein he says: “Allah (s.w.t.) has created the jinn in five kinds - some are like the wind in the air (invisible), some are in the form of snakes, some in the form of scorpions, some in the form of the insects of the earth while some are like the humans and they shall be subjected to Reckoning and punishment.”10 In the light of the above tradition and its expansive meaning, numerous problems encountered in narratives with respect to the jinn appear to be solved. For example, in some of the traditions of the Commander of the Faithful (a.s.), we read: لاَ تَشْرَبُوا الْمَآءَ مِنْ ثُلْمَةِ الإِِنَاءِ وَ لاَ مِنْ عُرْوَتِهِ فَإِنَّ الشَّيْطَانَ يَقْعُدُ عَلَى الْعُرْوَةِ وَ الثُّلْمَةِ. “Do not drink water from the broken portion of the vessel nor from the portion of the handle, for surely, the Shaytan sits upon the handle and the broken portion.”11 In view of the fact that Shaytan is from the jinn, and knowing the fact that the broken portion of the vessel and similarly its handle are places of accumulation of numerous microbes, it does not appear too far-fetched that jinn and Shaytan, in their expansive meanings, should also include these entities too, in addition to possessing a specific meaning, i.e. an entity, who possesses understanding, intelligence and religious obligation.
This article originally appears in The American Thinker Much has been made of the fact that the President’s appointment of Michael Brown to head up the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was a matter of pure politics, a plumb assignment given to a loyal partisan who was a college roommate of Bush confidante and former FEMA head Joseph Allbaugh. This may be true. And it also may be true that although Brown proved himself competent in other disasters, his performance in the aftermath of Katrina has been almost universally condemned both by partisan Democrats and even many Republicans. The criticism is usually attributed to the fact that Brown’s appointment was based not on his competence to do the job but rather his political connections. The one does not necessarily preclude the other. There are numerous examples in history of Presidents appointing cabinet officials for political reasons who turned out to be outstanding, even brilliant public servants. Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet was made up almost entirely of men who had opposed him for the Republican Presidential nomination. Salmon P. Chase was a former senator and governor who Lincoln named Secretary of the Treasury and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A lawyer with no experience in finance whatsoever, Chase proved himself to be an able and innovative Treasury Secretary. He is generally credited with keeping the government on sound fiscal footing while raising the cash necessary to pay for the Civil War. Another political appointee of Lincoln’s was Secretary of State William H. Seward whose policies helped to keep England and France on the sidelines during the war. Intervention by either of those two European superpowers could have spelled doom for the union. Edwin Stanton, who took over at the War Department for Simon Cameron, a corrupt political appointee, was an outstanding administrator and oversaw the rapid expansion of the armed forces. Lincoln’s most unusual and most successful political appointee may have been newspaper publisher Gideon Welles who served as Secretary of the Navy. It was Wells who commissioned the ironclad Monitor whose famous battle with the CSS Virginia changed naval warfare forever. Wells also came up with the plans for a naval blockade of the South that eventually contributed mightily to ending the war. None of these men were especially suited for the tasks assigned them. And yet, each performed magnificently in very trying times. Lincoln, like all Presidents, chose his subordinates based on a wide variety of factors, not the least of which was loyalty. And in Lincoln’s case, the political factor of geographic balance was vital to maintaining the support of a majority of northern citizens. But by far the most spectacularly successful political appointee of all time came about as a result of one the first acts of the Second Continental Congress of 1775; the naming of a Commander in Chief of the citizen army encamped outside Boston. Up to 12,000 militia had gathered to lay siege to the city following the April battles of Lexington and Concord. The Congress wanted to claim the army as its own but to do that involved some very delicate political maneuvering. The army was made up almost entirely of Massachusetts militia with a smattering of units from other New England states. Clearly, a way must be found to nationalize the army so that it at least appeared to represent all 13 colonies. Enter a young lawyer from Massachusetts named John Adams who had a burning desire to see America independent of Great Britain. Adams originally had plans of his own to lead the army but realized what was needed most was the naming of a commander who would nationalize the effort. There were candidates galore for the job. President of the Congress John Hancock had the advantage of being one of the wealthiest men in America but shared the same disadvantage as Adams; he hailed from Massachusetts. Israel Putnam, the pugnacious Major General currently in charge of the motley collection of militia and volunteers occupying the heights outside of Boston, was from Connecticut and had fought at Bunker Hill. But he was considered too provincial and perhaps too old by some to lead the army. Other General officers serving in the “New England Army” as it was called either weren’t well known or didn’t have the experience to lead such a large body of men. Besides, “the business needs a Virginian” as John Adams was said to have remarked. Adams recognized that if the Congress were to name a Commander from the south, it would unite the colonies behind the army and make it easier for the states to support its functions. Since Congress itself had no money, the army would be entirely dependent on contributions from the states for its sustenance – a fact of life that the Continental army dealt with until the end of the war. If the “business” did indeed require someone from the largest and oldest colony, Virginia obliged by supplying three qualified candidates for the job as Commander in Chief. Two of the candidates had extensive if not distinguished service in the regular British army. Charles Lee had joined the army at age 12 and steadily moved up the ranks. He served as an officer under General Braddock during the Fort Duquense expedition, a military adventure that saw his other rivals for command – George Washington and Horatio Gates – also present at that famous but ill-fated battle. After marrying the daughter of a Mohawk chief, Lee went back to England where he served in Portugal and Poland. Considered a brilliant tactician, he was nevertheless thought to be arrogant and eccentric – two qualities that came to the fore later in his career. Horatio Gates was another officer in the regular British army whose experience outshone even that of Lee. In addition to service in the colonies during the 7 Years War, he also participated in the capture of Martinique, one of the more spectacular British victories of the war. He rose to the rank of Major but due to his lowly social status was prevented from further advancement. He retired in 1769 and moved to Virginia. Almost to the end of the Revolutionary War, Gates had admirers both in and out of Congress who believed that he was the best man to lead the American armies to victory. The reason for this is largely hidden from us as Gates’ military abilities were more than once found wanting. However, in 1775 he looked like a pretty good bet except for one thing; many in Congress simply didn’t trust the fact that he had recently immigrated from England. John Adams had his own candidate from the beginning; a Virginia planter and former Commander of the Virginia militia named George Washington. Washington had the advantage of being well known throughout the colonies for his service during the 7 Years War, having in effect started the conflict with France by attacking a small party of French regulars near today’s Pittsburgh. He also distinguished himself in retreat during the Fort Duquense fiasco for which he became something of a hero . Otherwise, Washington’s military experience was extremely limited. In fact, he resigned his commission in the militia in 1759 because the British refused to make him an officer in the regular army. But Adams had bigger fish to fry than simply naming a commanding general. Washington had served in the Virginia House of Burgess and was as well known a political figure in the south as he was a military commander. It was part of Adams intent to cement the planter class in Virginia and the rest of the south to the cause. For that reason as well as the necessity to name a commander based on geographic balance, Adams successfully nominated and shepherded Washington’s election to the position of Commanding General of the Continental Army. There’s no doubt on paper that Washington was the least qualified of the three Virginians to lead the Continental army. While obviously a capable man, there was really nothing in his background to suggest greatness as a military commander or leader of men. As it turns out, Washington began his career as Commanding General with the disastrous New York campaign during which the Continental Army was almost destroyed. But Washington eventually developed a strategic sense that far outstripped both his rivals for command and his enemies. It was George Washington who saw early on that if he could keep his little army from being destroyed, the Revolution would go on. Following his brilliant victories at Trenton and Princeton, Washington stuck to that strategy until the end of the war. It is doubtful that the European trained Gates or Lee would have been any where near as successful. Appointing people to positions based mostly on politics – even to positions of enormous importance – has been done by every President in history. Harry Truman named Jame Byrnes, a long time politician with zero experience in foreign affairs, as Secretary of State in 1945. In his less than two years in that position, Byrnes proved himself to be pretty much of a non-entity, eventually being eased out by Truman in 1947. George Bush miscalculated when he named Michael Brown to the position of FEMA Director. But that doesn’t mean he appointed Brown thinking he wouldn’t be capable of doing an outstanding job. There are usually good reasons for appointing some one to fill an important position in the federal government. Sometimes, those reasons are political. Call it “cronyism,” the fact is that President’s want people they can trust implicitly in key positions. It’s just at times, the individual named just doesn’t seem up to the challenges posed by the office. In that case, good Presidents cut their losses and get rid of the appointee as soon as that becomes evident as Bush has now done. And while it may not satisfy his critics, Bush has a tremendous ability to expertly judge talent. Don’t be surprised if his recently named FEMA Director R. David Paulison proves himself more than capable of handling the job. Despite initial reports that Michael Brown was a college roomate of former FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh, they are apparently untrue. Allbaugh and Brown were friends in college but not not roomates. I apologize for the error.
The northern side of the chapel. The original chapel at this site was probably built in the late 12th century, but the building has been through numerous modifications since then. At one point in the late 18th century, Vice-Admiral Phillipe d'Auvergne transformed it into a private residence resembling a miniature gothick castle. Known as the Prince's Tower, it boasted a crenellated double turret incorporating a lookout and signal platform. The whole edifice was at least twice the height of the present structure.
Muscular tissue and also nutrition are 2 related aspects of bodybuilding. When a person acquires even more muscular tissue mass, he/she will certainly be less prone to injuries and also will melt a lot more calories after exercise. Muscle-building diet plans ought to consist of lots of healthy protein as well as carbs to develop and maintain muscle mass. A combination of carbs and also healthy protein is suitable for energy and muscle mass growth. Additionally, eating plenty of healthy protein after a workout will certainly promote muscle mass development and also definition. Healthy protein is the foundation of muscles. Your muscular tissues call for even more protein than the typical amount in order to expand and maintain. Low healthy protein levels cause muscle mass breakdown. A protein-rich diet can aid your body dropped excess body fat. An inactive specific demands 0.4 g of protein per extra pound of body weight, while an athlete calls for dual that quantity. For this reason, you should take healthy protein prior to and after exercising. To keep your body lean and also muscle, you require to follow a protein-rich diet regimen. Numerous research studies have actually evaluated the connection in between head and also neck muscular tissues and also abdominal muscles. Swartz et al. reported a connection between both groups making use of CT anthropometry. This research study was particularly valuable because it consisted of paravertebral muscular tissues, which are believed to be much less nutritionally essential than the masseter muscle mass. This research study also gave beneficial info to understand just how muscular tissue and nourishment affect each other. If you are considering a brand-new workout regimen, think about these findings. Another vital factor in the relationship in between muscular tissue as well as nutrition is the protein type. Healthy protein with high biological worth includes leucine, which optimizes the rate of protein synthesis. Similarly, whole-food protein has different anabolic buildings than egg whites as well as skim milk. Whole-food healthy protein might improve the prices of healthy protein synthesis, yet much more research is needed to understand exactly how these results function. In addition, it is uncertain if the benefits of whole-food healthy protein are preserved when the total power and also healthy protein material of the meal are well balanced. Overfeeding likewise does not generate desirable adjustments in body structure. While a large energy excess can advertise growth in some individuals, it is not likely to generate substantial increases in FM, even when professional athletes execute resistance training. Overfeeding has additionally been shown to generate little modification in contractile tissue. Consequently, skeletal muscular tissue hypertrophy requires a continual duration of tension as well as mechanotransduction at the muscular tissue fiber degree. The study’s writers end that enhancing healthy protein intake before an exercise is unnecessary for muscle hypertrophy. Milk is another wonderful food for muscular tissue and also nourishment. A solitary cup of icy edamame offers 17 grams of protein and eight grams of fiber. It is high in folate, a vitamin that is thought to promote muscular tissue growth. An additional excellent source of healthy protein is almonds. Approximately half a mug of blanched almonds offers 16 grams of protein and also contains high amounts of magnesium and also phosphorus, which aids the body in processing carbohydrates and fats for energy. Just like other foods, almonds should be eaten moderately and in small amounts. A broad understanding of the problems associated with power circulation as well as training period will certainly aid resistance-training professionals maximize their nutrient consumption. It can additionally assist professional athletes handle power consumption to fuel as well as recoup throughout workouts. Moreover, professional athletes should also take notice of the energy distribution in their everyday diets. While the suggested calorie intake for skeletal muscle hypertrophy depends on the training duration, eating treats will certainly promote skeletal MPS. This is a crucial topic for more research study. Making use of computed tomography, abdominal muscle at the 3rd back vertebra is another nutritional biomarker that predicts numerous illness. This method has actually been verified reputable in obese, geriatric, as well as sarcopenic people, and also it could even be used to screen for sarcopenia. However, there are few researches on the dietary evaluation of the brain making use of CT. So, there is no clear response yet. The relationship between muscular tissue as well as nourishment has actually been researched in patients with bladder cancer cells. Nutritional treatments and also rehab protocols are essential in this setting. Nutritional interventions as well as a dietary index can boost the diagnosis of clients with bladder cancer. The authors of the study also assessed the partnership in between an individual’s dietary status and the amount of stomach skeletal muscular tissue and also adipose tissue. This research study is necessary for several reasons. It highlights the important role of nutrition as well as muscle in the battle versus cancer. Muscle mass and nourishment go together, but there are some crucial differences between both. While protein is one of the most crucial factor for constructing muscular tissue mass, there are some other essential elements you require to consider too. Glutamine, an amino acid, is crucial for muscle repair after workout. This amino acid is likewise crucial for recovery after exercises, as your muscular tissues tear during workout. It likewise helps keep muscle mass tissue and also offers energy. Vitamin D is known for its benefits in promoting healthy and balanced bones, yet it is likewise necessary for healthy and balanced muscle mass. Vitamin D helps boost the manufacturing of healthy and balanced hormones, including testosterone, which is necessary for muscular tissue growth and also upkeep. Additionally, Vitamin D improves psychological health and wellness and also decreases anxiousness. Sadly, not many foods include vitamin D, and some physicians suggest supplements. The most effective sources of vitamin D are fatty fish, fortified milk as well as yogurt, eggs, and fortified orange juice. Carbs are among the building blocks of muscular tissues and also are a vital nutrient for development and also repair service. Carbohydrates help your muscular tissues to restore a lot more successfully after a workout as well as are an important part of several athletes’ diets. Carbs come from a range of sources, including entire grains, veggies, beans, fruits, as well as legumes. You can likewise obtain your carbohydrate repair by consuming foods high in fiber. muscle nutrition You need to eat at least 2,800 calories daily to build a pound of muscle mass. You must aim to take in in between 250 as well as 500 grams of protein per day, but remember that consuming greater than you need is likely to lead to excess fat gain. It’s likewise essential to eat a diverse diet plan which contains a variety of nourishing food products that will certainly keep you healthy. For ideal results, get in touch with a dietitian or dietary professional to customize your diet regimen to your specific demands.
Cannabis is a new agricultural crop, so it is important to begin to understand its impact on greenhouse gas emissions considering growing threats from climate change. Cultivating cannabis in a commercial setting can require high energy and water use for irrigation, lighting, and climate control. A new study evaluates the energy and materials used to grow indoor cannabis and quantifies the corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. Since recreational cannabis legalization in Colorado and Washington in 2012, cannabis in the US has grown into an industry with $13.6 billion in annual sales. Colorado alone sells more than 530 tons of legally grown cannabis flower per year. As states continue to embrace legalization, that number will continue to grow. However, increases in greenhouse gas from production can be expected with 41% of North American cannabis growers reporting use of indoor cultivation. One previous estimate of greenhouse gas emissions from indoor cannabis production reported 4,600 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per kg of cannabis produced. That report was conducted prior to legalization and was based on a case study of a small-scale grow. A new model recently published (2021) in Nature Sustainability accounts for all factors from seed to distribution and considers geographic differences. Greenhouse gas emissions of cannabis cultivation vary widely from 2,283 to 5,184 kg CO2-e per kg of dried flower based on location. The main contributing factors include electricity use for lighting and cooling, natural gas use for heating, and use of CO2 enrichment (emissions are due to compression and storage). Modifying outside air with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and varies significantly with geography. Highest greenhouse gas emissions from cannabis production can be observed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, with the lowest values in Long Beach, California. The high usage in Hawaii is associated with dehumidifying “consistently hot and humid outside air.” Additionally, Kaneohe Bay has a power grid relying more on oil compared to Long Beach with a power grid relying more on gas and solar power. The median value of emissions was determined to be 3,658 kg CO2e kg–1. The Mountain West and Midwestern United States are especially intensive for growing cannabis indoors, while California is among the lowest emitters. Within Colorado, mountainous areas were associated with significantly higher emissions than plains areas, and the researchers suggest that transporting product from optimal locations would curb overall emissions. Cultivating cannabis indoors anywhere leads to significant greenhouse gas emissions. Regulators will need to pay attention to the results of this study so they can implement strategies and guidance to prevent cannabis production from becoming problematic for the environment. Finally, allowing for federal legalization and interstate cannabis trade can encourage businesses to grow cannabis in areas where it has the least environmental impact instead of cultivating in states with more energy- and resource-intensive requirements. 1- Summers HM, Sproul E, Quinn JC. The greenhouse gas emissions of indoor cannabis production in the United States. Nature Sustainability. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00691-w. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00691. [Impact Factor: 9.647; Times Cited: 2 (Semantic Scholar)] 2- Mills E. The carbon footprint of indoor cannabis production. Energy Policy. 2012;46:58–67. [Impact Factor: 5.042; Times Cited: 59 (Semantic Scholar)] Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash
We have just seen that in the context of the Qur'an and according to traditions, according to Ijma'a and according to Reason, the only meaning of "Khatamun-Nabiyyin" which is relevant is 'The Last of The Prophets', 'One who closed the prophethood. Now let us see what the dictionaries say about 'Khatam' or. 'Khatm'. ختم العمل = (Khatam al-amal) = He finished the, work given to him. ختم الاناء = (Khatam al-ina'a) = He sealed the mouth of pot (so that nothing comes out of it and nothing enters into it). ختم الكتاب = (Khatam al-Kitab) = Closed the envelope and sealed it (so that nothing is added into the letter or put into the envelope). It must be mentioned here that 'seal' in Arabic does not mean the cancellation stamp of post offices which are put on the postal articles before sending them onward. It means the seal of wax which is put on the envelopes to protect it from forgery or additions. ختم على القلب = (Khatama alal qalb) = He put a seal on the heart (so that no new idea enters into it and no old prejudice is removed from it). ختام كل مشروب = (Khitamu kulle mashrub) = The last taste felt at the end of a drink. ختامة كل شيء = (Khatematu kulle shay) = End of everything; and its finish. ختم الشيء = (Khatamash shay) = To 'khatm' a thing means to come at the end of that thing. And it is in this sense that we use the word 'Khatm ul-Qur'an', i.e., to read the Qur'an up to its end. Also it is for this reason that the last verses of each Sura are called (خواتيم) 'Khawateem'. ختم القوم = Khatam ul- Qawm = The last man of the tribe or nation. These meanings are given in all the authentic dictionaries of Arabic language. The Qadianis say that if someone is said to be 'Khatam ush-Shu'ara' or 'Khatam ul-Mufassireen' or 'Khatam ul-Fuqaha', nobody thinks that after that person no other poet or Faqeeh (religious jurisprudent) or Mufassir (commentator) was born. Everybody thinks that it means that the said person was the most expert in that field of knowledge. These people forget that if a word is sometimes used metaphorically (in fill allegorical sense) that metaphorical use does not deprive it of its real meaning. If, for example, the word 'Lion' is sometimes used for a brave man, it does not mean that this word cannot be used for the animal, for which it was coined. Such arguments show the hollowness of their minds and bankruptcy of their thinking. Even if one thousand persons are called 'Khatam ul-Mufassireen' (in the sense of 'the most perfect Mufassir') the real meaning of the word 'Khatam' would remain the same i.e., The Last. A sample of Qadianis miscomprehension of subject matter may be seen in the following sentence of their Chief Missionary in Tanzania, Sheikh Muhammad Munawwar H.A. It should be borne in mind that being 'last' of a group of people is no distinction in itself. Sir Richard Turnbull was the last governor of Tanganyika. Does this add to his status as a governor or indicates his superiority over the late Twining?" (A lively Discussion). He does not pause to think that the Nubuwwah of Prophet Muhammad Al-Mustafa (S) is not like governorship of Sir Richard Turnbull. Sir Richard Tumbull was the last governor because the British rule came to an end with him. And a national government ousted him and his masters from the soil of Tanganyika. Muhammad Al-Mustafa (S) is the Last Prophet because his prophethood is not to be usurped by any impostor; he is the last prophet because his 'rule' will continue up to Qiyamah; and no one coming after him can use his title and name for himself. To talk in Sheikh Muhammad Munawwar's language, if Sir Richard Turnbull's governorship were to continue up to the last day of the world, and all representatives of the British crown coming after him were obliged to keep his 'Chair' vacant for him, and not to use the Title of Governor for the themselves but just to sign as the 'Leader of the government', would it not have been a tremendous tribute to Sir Richard Turnbull? The Qadiani Missionary had written to me: "Imam Suyuti and Imam Ibn Athil' Al-Jazari were given the title of 'Khatam ul-Huffuz' (The Last of those who remembered traditions); likewise, Abu Tammam at-Tai has been described as ' Khatam ush-Shu'ara' (The Last Poet). Can it be said that there was no 'Hafiz' after Imam Suyuti or Imam Jazari, or no poet after Abu Tammam at Tai?" I asked him: First of all have those phrases been used in the Qur'an or tradition? As I told you earlier, the phrase 'Khatam un-Nabiyyin' was never used in Arabic before Qur'an; and that the Qur'an has used it for the first time. Thus, the meaning given to this phrase by the Holy Prophet is its real meaning. If someone else uses such phrases in some other allegorical sense, it does not make that allegory its real meaning. For example, "moon" has a real meaning which all of us know. If someone uses the word 'moon' for the face of a beautiful person it does not mean that 'beautiful face' is the real meaning of 'moon' or that it cannot be used for the terrestrial object for which it was made. Thirdly, these references, in fact, show the writer's thought (though wrong) that Imam Suyuti (for example) was the last Hafiz. It was their mistaken idea, which has been proved wrong. And no wonder. Those writers did not know what was in future. But can you suppose that Allah also did not know the future when He said that Muhammad (S) was the Last of the Prophets? How can you compare the words of Allah with the writings of some mortals? At the most you can say that those writers were wrong in believing that the person concerned was the last Hafiz or the last poet. But you cannot change the real meaning of 'Khatam un-Nabiyyin' to make their writings correct. If you tell an Arab 'Ja'a Khatam ul-Qawm " he will never understand that the most learned man of the tribe has reached; he will always think that the whole tribe has arrived, till the last man. It is because of this that every writer of the dictionary; and every commentator of the Qur'an, without any exception has written that 'Khatam un-Nabiyyin' means 'Akhir un-Nabiyyin', the Last of the Prophets. If you look impartially at these proofs from the Qur'an, tradition, dictionary and language, you will have to agree that the Holy Prophet of Islam was the Last Prophet and prophethood ended with him. No prophet will ever come after him up to the day of Qiyamah; and anybody claiming to be a prophet would be an impostor. The Qadiani missionary had written to me; "There is a tradition in Tafseer Safi (Sura Al Ahzab, Ruku 2) that the Holy Prophet said to Imam Ali: "O Ali, I am Khatam ul-Anbiya’ and you are Khatam ul-Awliya’". Now can anybody say that Imam Ali was the last Wali and no other Wali can come after him?" I wrote to him: This supposed tradition quoted from Tafseer Safi is not only without any Sanad (chain of narrators) but also it cannot be found in any other book of tradition. On the other hand, there are some traditions in the books written by the Sunnis as well as the Shias which describe Imam Ali (a.s.) as "Khatam ul-Ausiya’" or "Khatam ul-Wasiyyin" (The Last of the successors of the Prophets). Here are two of the said traditions: 1. Sheikh Suleman al-Balakhi al-Qanduzi, al-Hanafi wrote his book 'Yanabi-ul-Mawaddah' by order of Sultan Abdul-Aziz, the Turkish Caliph of the Sunnis; the book was published under the authority of the Turkish Caliphate in Istanbul, in 1301 Hijra. He quotes in the said book: "Likewise, Al-Hamwaini has narrated the tradition from Abu Dhar that he said that the Holy Prophet (S) said, 'I am Khatam un-Nabiyyin and you, O Ali, are Khatam ul-Wasiyyin up to the day of Judgment". 2. Ubaidullah Amritsari quotes in his hook, Arjahul-Matalib1, a long tradition from Anas, in which the Holy Prophet (S) described Imam Ali (a.s.) as "Amir-ul-Mu'mineen wa Sayyid ul-Muslimeen wa Khatam ul-Wasiyyin wa Imam ul-Ghurril-Muhajjaleen". This tradition has been quoted from Ibn Mardwaih. It shows that Imam Ali (a.s.) was "The Commander of the Faithful, Chief of the Muslims; and the Last of Successors (of the Prophets) and the Leader of those who will come on the Day of Judgment with shining faces and illuminated hands and feet". In fact, these traditions are one more proof of the Finality of the Prophethood. Imam Ali (a.s.) was "the Last of the Successors of the Prophets", because there was no other prophet to come after the Last of the Prophets Muhammad Al-Mustafa (S) up to the Day of Qiyamah (Resurrection). Had there been any other awaited prophet, Ali (a.s.) could not have been described as the Last or the Successors of the Prophets. So you see, the correct tradition is not for you; it is against your belief. Now it appears that some scribes made a mistake in copying Manaqib (from where this tradition has been taken in Safi) and wrote Khatam ul-Awliya’ in place of Khatam ul-Awsiya’. That is why you cannot find this tradition in any other book of traditions, except Manaqib or where it has been quoted from Manaqib. It is one more sign of the weakness of your cause that you have to clutch to such misquoted or wrong traditions! Qadianis say: "In the book "Kanz ul-Ummal", Vol. 6, p.178, Seyyidana Abbas (uncle of the Holy Prophet (S) has been called "Khatam ul-Muhajireen". Does it mean that he was the Last Muhajir (emigrant)?" Fact: Yes. He was in fact the Last Muhajir. You must understand that Al-Muhajireen and Al Ansar mentioned in the Qur'an and tradition have a special meaning. In other words, they are special terms. The word ' Al-Muhajireen ' is used only for those who in the earlier days of hardship of Islam left their towns and migrated either to Ethiopia or Medina. And 'Ansar' is used only for those inhabitants of Medina who helped the Holy Prophet (S) and the Al-Muhajireen in those days. Hijrat (emigration) was discontinued after Holy Prophet entered Mecca in the year 8 of Hijra. Before surrender of Mecca the Muslims of Mecca and other places were required to do Bay'at (allegiance) on Islam and Hijrat. After the surrender of Mecca, Mujalid bin Mas'ud accepted Islam and wanted to do Bay'at on Islam and Hijrat, as was the system. But the Holy Prophet (S) said: "There is no Hijrat after the capture of Mecca", and Mujalid did Bay'at on Islam only. (See Bukhari Vol. 4, p.92). Therefore; Abbas was in fact the Last of Al-Muhajireen who left their town for Medina as the word is used in the Qur'an. Hafiz Ibn Hajar writes about Abbas in his book Al-Isaba Fi Ma'arifatis sahaba (Vol. 3, p.668): "He did Hijrat shortly before capture of Mecca and participated in that capture." History says that Abbas together with his family left Mecca for Medina; but met the Holy Prophet (S) in the way at Juhfa or Rabigh (who was going to capture Mecca with his army). There upon. Abbas sent his family to Medina and accompanied the Holy Prophet to Mecca. Naturally when heard the Holy Prophet (S) saying that "there was no Hijrat after capture of Mecca", he was perturbed that perhaps he would not be counted among the Muhajireen. You see Hijrat was being abolished just alter his migration from Mecca, and he had not yet reached Medina before that declaration. When the Holy Prophet (S) came to know of his anxiety he told him not to worry, because he was "the Last Muhajir". "Do not worry, O uncle, because thou art the last of the Muhajireen". I know that, according to the dictionary, anybody migrating from one place and going to another may be called 'Muhajir? But he will not be among the 'Al-Muhajireen' of the Qur'an. Likewise anybody conveying the message of one man to another may be called 'Rasul'. But he will not be the 'Rasul' of Allah according to the Qur'an. And anybody bringing a news can be called 'Nabi', but he will not be the 'Nabi' of Qur'an. Just to show how your argument has no leg to stand, I would like you to tell me how will you interpret the phrase 'Khatam ul- Muhajireen? Does it mean "Superior to all the Muhajirs"? Impossible, because Abbas was never considered superior to Ali (a.s.), Hamza and many other Muhajirs. Or does it mean "Seal of the Muhajirs?" If so then does it mean that other people became Muhajir by the seal of Abbas? Or does it mean that he was confirming the Hijrat of other Muhajirs? Surely, none of these meaning can fit here, except the "Last Muhajir". 'Thus, it is clear that Abbas was called "Khatam ul-Muhajireen" because he was "The Last Muhajir".
Omega-3: the discovery Fatty acids omega-3 were discovered by the Danish scientist Dierberger, who has studied especially the lives of Inuit, its perfect health and longevity. The basis of the diet of Northern peoples is fat sea fish. The result was a focus on two natural unsaturated fatty acids – eicosapentaenoic (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA), comprise the substance of omega-3. When the body needs polyunsaturated fatty acids Omega-3 is able to provide a range of healing influences on the body, contains in fats of vegetable and marine origin, and especially it is rich in the fatty liver of marine fish. Polyunsaturated fatty acids regulate metabolism, prevent the occurrence and progression of diseases of the cardiovascular and nervous systems, gastrointestinal tract, improve memory and vision. Stimulating the production of prostaglandins, which are natural anti-inflammatory components of the blood, omega-3s reduce inflammation and pain. The medulla is 60% fat and for the proper functioning needs omega-3 acids. Omega-3 reduces the concentration of cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein in the body, thereby preventing the development of atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases, thrombosis. Dietary Supplement indicated for overweight, diabetes, hypertension, for the prevention and treatment of thrombosis, psoriasis, eczema, dry skin and hair, dandruff. Polyunsaturated fatty acids class omega-3 needed by the body especially in functional disorders of the Central nervous system, accompanied by a decrease of mental activity, chronic fatigue, rehabilitation after acute disorders of cerebral circulation. Their use is justified in the complex treatment of autoimmune, skin, cancer, etc. The use of omega-3 during pregnancy promotes proper formation of the nervous system of the fetus. How to fill the deficit of omega-3 The lack of fatty acids omega-3 can be replenished by eating Flaxseed or rapeseed oil, fish that live in cold water, walnuts, cauliflower, broccoli, melons, spinach, beans, Chinese cabbage. Also to fill the gap, there are capsule-drugs of omega-3, which is taken orally during or after meals. Dosage and duration of use are governed by the regulations specific to Supplement, individual needs and doctor's recommendations. The average norm for a healthy person is about 180-300 mg EPA and 120-200 mg DHA, to fill which, in most cases, taking 1 capsule. Contraindications to the use of omega-3 Omega-3 is not recommended for use during individual intolerance, Allergy to fish products, impaired liver function and hemorrhagic syndrome.
Wheeler, Elizabeth (Betsy) . HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth. Disability in Young Adult and Children's Books . University of Michigan Press. 2019. HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth is the first disability studies book on contemporary children’s and young adult literature. HandiLand claims that literature for young readers is the ideal viewing stand for a parade of political changes as youth with disabilities have infiltrated public space. This viewing stand allows us to see how far we’ve come toward defeating ableism and how far we still need to go. HandiLand examines the new prominence of youth with disabilities in contemporary English-language books from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana. Many of these books are bestsellers with a passionate fan base, including The Fault in Our Stars, Harry Potter, and Wonder. Elizabeth A. Wheeler argues that these new portrayals result from the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and other worldwide rights laws, which enabled the movement of disabled youth into public space. HandiLand has three purposes. First, Wheeler uses children’s and young adult literature and popular culture as sites for exploring contemporary understandings of disability. Second, she derives principles for understanding social justice from the experiences of adults and families with disabilities. Third, she offers these ideas to a wide audience by writing about complex things in clear language. This audience includes scholars and students of disability studies, literature for young readers, comics, environmental humanities, African American literature, queer discourse, and public space, but it also includes parents, educators, therapists, doctors, policy makers, and everyone else whose work, ideas, and hands touch young people with disabilities. Fields of Focus: American Studies , Comics and Cartoon Studies , Cultural Studies , Disability Studies , Literature and the Environment , Race and Ethnicity , Visual Culture
The death of George Floyd, the outpouring of anger, the marches, people “taking the knee” and the apology videos seem an age away now. Few people are talking about #BlackLivesMatter and a significant proportion of those who are, do so negatively as part of counter attacks against Marxist wokeness. Yet if we genuinely are concerned to see Gospel churches in our cities that reflect the diversity of humanity, we cannot simply let the matter get put to bed. Black lives mattered before the hashtag, they matter after. So, from time to time, I keep returning to the question of race in my reading, thinking and writing. I’ve recently read the book, White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism by Robin Diangelo and so I would like to share some thoughts on it here. Diangelo is an associate professor of education at the University of Washington with a PHD in multicultural education. Her area of focus is in critical discourse studies and whiteness studies. White Fragility is a book encouraging us to think carefully about the problems of systemic racism. Our tendency is to associate racism with “bad people,” with those who express hatred towards people of colour and express it in offensive words, overtly discriminatory behaviour and violent actions. However, she argues, as have numerous authors recently that it reflects more a culture in which people experience systemic discrimination because the world is stacked in favour of white people. Furthermore, whilst white people may want to believe that they are free from racism, especially when endorsing liberal values, underlying prejudices are often still, even if subconsciously present in how we talk, act and think. Much of what Diangelo argues on this point is persuasive and worthy of attention. This is important for Christians when engaging in conversation about racism and sin. We may be able to identify individual examples of sin whilst missing the ways in which idolatry shapes a whole culture. Diangelo distinguishes between prejudice and racism. We all have prejudices. People from different ethnic groups can be prejudiced against each other and against white people. When Diangelo talks about racism, she is talking about power as well. Historic economic and political power resulting from colonialism, slavery and segregation mean that there is a difference between the prejudices we see and the experience black people have of white supremacy and racism. This also means that whilst overtly racist language and actions may be diminished, more acceptable ways of raising the threat or enacting prejudice against blacks may occur. Diangelo particularly highlights how a particular neighbourhood may be portrayed as unsafe due to crime whereas a different neighbourhood reflects aspiration and opportunities for better language. She further highlights how racial prejudice is suppressed rather than dealt with. She talks about how a white child spotting a black person may comment on the person’s skin colour only to be shushed. The child learns that colour is something negative and taboo. They have not learnt to be racist, they have learnt not to talk about people of colour. Finally, for consideration is the issue whereby whiteness is seen as colour/ethnic neutral, the default option. I have personally observed this in different ways over the years. Perhaps the most embarrassing example was the enthusiastic mission team who stood up to do their kids talk about how we can all be united equal in Jesus. They came onto the platform and displayed a visual aid, lots of coloured diamonds. We are all different. But look, we can come together as one. If the illustration had finished there, it wouldn’t have been too bad. However, the now joined together diamonds were turned over, yes there was the diversity of colour but look, they were united and the same, despite all their differences, together, they were bright, shining and … you’ve guessed it … white. Another example we see is the way in which theologies are described as Black, Asian and Latino whereas western theologies are just … theology. Whiteness and western thought becomes the neutral arbitrator of everything and the lens through which we read and evaluate everything else. I believe that White Fragility helpfully raises a number of issues concerning race that will challenge us and get us thinking. It is so easy for me to say “I am not a racist…” and then to give various reasons as to why I am not racist whilst both holding onto prejudices against people from different ethnic backgrounds, enjoying the privileges of whiteness and failing to spot or to act upon the systemic causes of injustice in society. However, I did find problems with the book and my first problem is the feeling that the fact I have a problem is likely to blamed on my whiteness and not on any failings by the book and its author. Part of that arises because at times it feels like the book asserts too much when there is a greater need for demonstration and evidence. But it also arises out of how I see the author interact both with her audience among her readership and with the examples she uses from her own experience as a diversity trainer and facilitator. The assumption is that white people cannot talk easily about race because of the problems with our whiteness. We are fragile and angry. Yet, whilst to some extent that is true, I don’t think this excuses, especially fellow white people a responsibility to think carefully about how they engage. The author frequently returns to the examples of people in her diversity classes who receive personal, public, negative feedback. When they leave her classes distressed and alienated, this further evidences their fragility and racism rather than raising genuine questions about whether or not as a facilitator she might have handled things better. Like a lot of contemporary literature, I believe that the book is most likely to support and reinforce people in the conclusions they have already come to regarding race. It is therefore unlikely to be a game change in the way that other works are. Secondly, I am not convinced by the prejudice/racism distinction. I agree that there is a difference between prejudice in terms of general wariness and dislike versus discrimination where the discriminator has power. However, it is possible that between cultures where white people are absent that other ethnic groups might hold power and in micro-cultural contexts where it is not the white working class person who has power but middle class people from other ethnic backgrounds. White fragility may ultimately prove too simplistic an analysis. Thirdly, her solution to the problem of white fragility is to be a little less white. We cannot, in her opinion recover a positive white culture. Whiteness, is in her opinion, irreparably, irretrievably racist. I wonder at this stage whether she is truly speaking for black people or is in fact appropriating their sense of injustice in order to base her own negative attitudes and resentments towards her own culture, particularly if she feels that this culture has failed her. Here of course we cut to the heart of a godless attempt to produce ethics. We end up with guilt and shame that we cannot recover from, that we cannot atone for and that where is no-one who is able to atone for it on our behalf. Such a situation is hopeless. Is there really nothing to take pleasure in, nothing to redeem about 40,000 fans singing on the football terraces, or a welsh male voice choir singing Guide me oh thou Great Jehovah, in visiting Blenheim Palace or eating fish and chips for tea on a wet and windy seafront? In moving from bad people versus good people to bad culture versus good culture, do we end up simply continuing the problem? Is there an alternative? I’ve been writing about subversive fulfilment in an urban context recently but I want to suggest that this applies tom white middle class culture too. We need to apply the tools of missiology on our own hearts and cultures. This means being willing to step back into white culture, to recognise that in it we’ll find people’s questions, searching for answers and hope, we’ll find positive points of contact with the Gospel we’ll find aspirations and dreams. White society and culture should be as recoverable by the Gospel as any culture. Ultimately White Fragility like any human fragility is hopeless because it lacks the Gospel. Ultimately, the Gospel brings hope to the most futile and hopeless seeming situation.
First-Line Supervisors of Production & Operating Workers Also called: Manufacturing Supervisor, Production Supervisor, Shift Supervisor, Team Leader What they do:Directly supervise and coordinate the activities of production and operating workers, such as inspectors, precision workers, machine setters and operators, assemblers, fabricators, and plant and system operators. On the job, you would: - Enforce safety and sanitation regulations. - Direct and coordinate the activities of employees engaged in the production or processing of goods, such as inspectors, machine setters, and fabricators. - Confer with other supervisors to coordinate operations and activities within or between departments. Manufactured or Agricultural Goods Engineering and Technology Education and Training Ideas and Logic People interested in this work like activities that include leading, making decisions, and business. They do well at jobs that need: You might use software like this on the job: Enterprise resource planning ERP software Data base user interface and query software Electronic mail software See more details at O*NET OnLine about first-line supervisors of production and operating workers.
Beyond Traditional Literature Literature is a slippery concept to define, and over the years people have changed its definition. From the 1400's-1700's 'literature' was more or less synonymous with 'literacy' and was a characteristic of the reader. In the mid-eighteenth century though, we see a shift where the term ‘literature’ is being used more to describe the reading material rather than the reader. Since then, literature has been subject to many other changes, exclusions, and inclusions, and today we have narrowed the definition to include only fictional poetry, novels, and drama. So there is a problem. Poetry, novels, and dramas are only a few forms of storytelling, and certainly not the only forms practiced by women and other disenfranchised groups throughout history who used the means and material available to them. Some of the other forms include: diaries, oral accounts, scrapbooks, and letters. Why is this a problem? Because until very recently, the only people publishing poetry, novels, and dramas, were mostly males, and women had no public means of expressing themselves or their stories. If we value traditional literature for its ability to render the human experience concretely and help us to understand the mysteries of ourselves, then nontraditional literature is wrongfully excluded from our canon. Women’s letters in particular give us perspectives on our world that the business and political letters of men during the same times do not. Some recount historic events, some give heartfelt advice, and still others give us incredible insight into their resilience and bravery. In 1776 Abigail Grant wrote a letter to her colonial husband calling him a coward for refusing to fight at Bunker Hill, and offered to trade him places so she could fight: "Inform me how it is, And if you are afraid pray own the truth & come home & take care of our Children & I will be Glad to Come & take your place, & never will be Called a Coward, neither will I throw away one Cartridge but exert myself bravely in so good a Cause." Literature is vital to human beings to understanding our nature, teaching our youth, and questioning the world around us. If we exclude work like women’s letters from the canon, we are limited to bias expressions of our nature. I hope we all expand our libraries to include more nontraditional literature and pursue a more complete understanding of our nature and culture.
The Truth About Miniature Labradors One of the most popular breeds among dogs is the Labrador retriever, and many people with restricted space have shown interest in learning more about the possibility of obtaining miniature Labradors. It may surprise them to learn that “miniature” actually means dwarfed. The breed standard for a Labrador retriever is for males to reach a height around 24 inches at the withers and females around 23 inches, as stated in the AKC descriptive standards. Many attributes make the dog an extremely popular choice as a pet, including its gentle and friendly nature as well as its intelligence. They are also a highly sought after breed for use as assistance dog in the service industry as they are ideal for training and dependency. It is certainly understandable how the Labrador holds such great appeal to humans with these plus other highly desirable characteristics. The Need For Miniatures Labradors are very active dogs with no other desire than to please their masters. Because of the energy driven nature of the Lab combined with their medium size, the dog is sometimes not the best choice as a pet for some. Often, people who seek a miniature version of a dog breed do so because of the space they have available to house the animal. They like the characteristics of a Lab, for example, but may lack the room in both housing and yard space for such an energetic animal. It could be also that they may just carry a preference for a smaller dog over larger dogs. In the interests of appealing to this group of people as well as to develop a unique strain for financial gain, dogs that are called “miniature” have begun to appear on the market. Selective Breeding And Genetic Defects There is no breed that is recognized officially as a miniature version of the Labrador. To achieve a smaller animal, offspring of normal sized Labradors that are considered to be the “runts” of the litter are nurtured to eventually be bred with other runts. There is no assurance that the progeny of such a breeding will result in smaller dogs, although this is often the method used to develop miniatures. Often, selective breeding results in defects of the original breed, and in the case of Labradors, cases of dwarfism result that could also have a direct link to eye defects as well as other issues. Breeding Labs is a process that should be left strictly to professional and knowledgeable breeders, since there are over 100 genetic defects associated with Labrador retrievers. Attempting to breed for the purpose of achieving miniature Labradors can result in severe defective traits that may not immediately be evident in the animal as a pup. Many dogs that are stamped with the label “miniature Labradors” are actually afflicted with dwarfism. The usual cause for dwarfism is inbreeding of the animal, although the defect can be due to a problem with the pituitary gland as well. They can be bred, but according to stringent regulations. The minis will generally display most qualities beloved in normal sized Labs, and are easier to handle. These mini labs often live satisfactory lives, although many health problems could afflict the smaller dogs due to the condition. The Labrador Retriever Club The Labrador Retriever Club, which is the only organization recognized by the American Kennel Club as the parent club for Labradors, strongly discourages any attempts to develop miniature strains of the Lab. They state categorically that it borders the unethical for breeders to intentionally breed dogs to derive an alternate size of the animal. Though miniature Labradors are advertised to be simply smaller versions of the AKC recognized Lab, it is important to remember there are no true miniatures; a fact backed by the AKC and the Labrador Retriever Club.
The purpose of this book is to explain the use of the GNU C and C++ compilers, gcc and g++. After reading this book you should understand how to compile a program, and how to use basic compiler options for optimization and debugging. This book does not attempt to teach the C or C++ languages themselves, since this material can be found in many other places (see section Further reading). Experienced programmers who are familiar with other systems, but new to the GNU compilers, can skip the early sections of the chapters "Compiling a C program", "Using the preprocessor" and "Compiling a C++ program". The remaining sections and chapters should provide a good overview of the features of GCC for those already know how to use other compilers. The Linux Administrator's Security Guide A computer is secure if you can depend on it and it's software to behave as you expect" - Practical UNIX and Internet Security Security is: availability, consistency, access control, data confidentiality, authentication. - http://www.sun.com/security/overview.html The principal objective of computer security is to protect and assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of automated information systems and the data they contain." - http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/secpubs/cslaw.txt . There are numerous definitions for "computer security", and most of them are correct. Essentially computer security means enforcement of usage policies, this must be done since people and software have flaws that can result in accidents, but also because someone may want to steal your information, use your resources inappropriately or simply deny you the use of your resources. Security for Beginners There is a saying in the security world that the only truly safe computer system is one that is disconnected from the network, switched off and buried six feet under ground. The sentiment may be somewhat true but it is hardly a practical solution to the problems we face today in protecting servers and desktops from outside intrusion. There are more computer systems connected to the internet either directly or via local area networks than at any time in the history of technology and the numbers are growing at a rapid rate. It seems that not a month goes by without another story in the news about the internal network of a major corporation being compromised by an intruder. Linux Installation and Getting Started Linux Installation and Getting Started is a free document; you may reproduce and/or modify it under the terms of version 2 (or, at your option, any later version) of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. This book is distributed in the hope it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details, in Appendix C. The authors encourage wide distribution of this book for personal or commercial use, provided the above copyright notice remains intact and the method adheres to the provisions of the GNU General Public License (see Appendix C). In summary, you may copy and distribute this book free of charge or for a profit. No explicit permission is required from the author for reproduction of this book in any medium, physical or electronic. Beyond Linux From Scratch Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) is a project that continues where the LFS book finishes. It assists users in developing their systems according to their needs by providing a broad range of instructions for installing and configuring various packages on top of a base LFS system.Nearly anything! An LFS system is primed to become a system that fits whatever need you have. BLFS is the book that takes you down your own custom path. You could build an office workstation, a multimedia desktop, a router, a server, or all of the above! And the best part is you only install what you need. Linux Knowledge Base and Tutorial The Linux Knowledge Base and Tutorial (LINKBAT) is a web-based, unified knowledge base and tutorial with the primary goal of educating users on Linux. Please Note: In moving to PHPNuke many of the aspects that we were planning have either been put on hold indefinately, or discarding completely. For example, we are reconsidering using XML as an input source, instead, new material could be added using forms on the site. I have not made the changes to the Linkbat project documentation as I want to add a number of features to the Tutorialas quickly as possible. The KnowledgeUnit concepts all still apply, although we have adding and expanded them. In addition, we are currently using a MYSql database and not CSV text files. Linux System Administrators Guide The Linux System Administrator's Guide, describes the system administration aspects of using Linux. It is intended for people who know next to nothing about system administration, but who have already mastered at least the basics of normal usage. This manual doesn't tell you how to install Linux; that is described in the Installation and Getting Started document. See below for more information about Linux manuals. System administration covers all the things that you have to do to keep a computer system in usable order. It includes things like backing up files (and restoring them if necessary), installing new programs, creating accounts for users (and deleting them when no longer needed), making certain that the file system is not corrupted, and so on. If a computer were, say, a house, system administration would be called maintenance, and would include cleaning, fixing broken windows, and other such things. Newbie Administrators Guide We are relative Linux newbies (with Linux since Summer 1998). We run mostly RedHat and Mandrake -> the solutions might not be directly applicable to other Linux distributions (although most of them probably will be). Hope this helps; we try to be as practical as possible. Of course, we provide no warranty whatsoever. If you spotted a bad error or would like to contribute a part on a topic of your choice, we would like to hear from you. A complete reference for new Linux users who wish to set up and administer their own Linux home computer, workstation and/or their home or small office network. The answers are meant to be simple, with just sufficient detail, and always supported with a readily usable example. The work is still in progress, but we hope the Guide can be helpful already. We welcome your corrections, advice, criticism, links, translations, and CONTRIBUTIONS. Pls note that there are no ad banners on our pages. and Optimizing Linux I realized that a lot of people wanted to see it published for its contents, to get advantages out of it and see the power of this beautiful Linux system in action. A lot of time and effort went into the making of this book, and to ensure that the results were as accurate as possible. If you find any abnormalities, inconsistent results, errors, omissions or anything else that doesn't look right, please let me know so I that can investigate the problem or correct the error. Suggestions for future versions are also welcome and appreciated Lately it seems that two topics crop up in conversation after conversation: the stock market and Linux. As for the stock market, I'm something of a pessimist. When friends and even perfect strangers continually recount their recent financial successes, I conclude that a stock market correction is overdue. (I've shifted my investments to bonds.) As for Linux, I'm considerably more - perhaps wildly - optimistic. When my realtor tells me about the TV feature on Linux she saw on CNN, I see it as a harbinger of Linux Spring. Like her, my cable TV repairman, and my colleague in the next office, you've probably heard about Linux from a magazine, radio or TV program, or a friend. You're wondering what Linux is about and whether you should give it a try. If so, particularly if you currently use Microsoft Windows, this book was written for you. Advanced Linux Programming is published under the Open Publication License, Version 1, no options exercised. (Due to an oversight in final production, the copyright notice on the book is incorrect.) The full text may be downloaded from this site. Code samples in the book are covered by the GNU General Public License and are also available. The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too. This book is intended for Linux users who want to learn more about the inner workings of Linux and how the various pieces of the Operating System fit together. This book will guide you step-by-step in creating your own custom build Linux system from scratch, using the source code of the software that we need. This book is also intended for Linux users who want to get away from the existing commercial and free distributions that are often too bloated. Using existing distributions also forces you to use the file system structure, boot script structure, etc. that they choose to use. With this book you can create your own structures and methods in exactly the way you like them (which can be based on the ones this book provides) Linux Network Administrator's Guide The idea of networking is probably as old as telecommunications itself. Consider people living in the Stone Age, when drums may have been used to transmit messages between individuals. Suppose caveman A wants to invite caveman B over for a game of hurling rocks at each other, but they live too far apart for B to hear A banging his drum. What are A's options? He could 1) walk over to B's place, 2) get a bigger drum, or 3) ask C, who lives halfway between them, to forward the message. The last option is called networking. Of course, we have come a long way from the primitive pursuits and devices of our forebears. Nowadays, we have computers talk to each other over vast assemblages of wires, fiber optics, microwaves, and the like, to make an appointment for Saturday's soccer match. In the following description, we will deal with the means and ways by which this is accomplished, but leave out the wires, as well as the soccer part. Kernel module Programming Guide This document is for people who want to write kernel modules. Although I will touch on how things are done in the kernel in several places, that is not my purpose. There are enough good sources which do a better job than I could have done. This document is also for people who know how to write kernel modules, but have not yet adapted to version 2.2 of the kernel. If you are such a person, I suggest you look at appendix to see all the differences I encountered while updating the examples. The list is nowhere near comprehensive, but I think it covers most of the basic functionality and will be enough to get you started. The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or non commercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation and Usage We're glad to have this opportunity to introduce you to Debian! As we begin our journey down the road of GNU/Linux, we'd like to first talk a bit about what exactly Debian is - what it does, and how it fits in with the vast world of Free Software. Then, we talk a bit about the phenomenon that is Free Software and what it means for Debian and you. Finally, we close the chapter with a bit of information about this book itself.Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. At the core of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental program on the computer: It does all the basic housekeeping and lets you start other programs. Debian uses the Linux kernel, a completely free piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. A large part of the basic tools that fill out the operating system come from the GNU Project, and these tools are also free. The complete programmer's reference for the Motif toolkit now covers Motif 2.1, the latest release of Motif. It is a source for complete, accurate, and insightful guidance on Motif application programming. There is no other book that covers the ground as thoroughly or as well as this one. The book describes how to write applications using the Motif toolkit and goes into detail on every Motif widget class, with useful examples that will help programmers to develop their own code. Anyone doing Motif programming who doesn't want to have to figure it out on their own needs this book. Kernel 2.4 Internals Introduction to the Linux 2.4 kernel. The latest copy of this document can be always downloaded from: http://www.moses.uklinux.net/patches/lki.sgml This guide is now part of the Linux Documentation Project and can also be downloaded in various formats from: http://www.linuxdoc.org/guides.html or can be read online (latest version) at: http://www.moses.uklinux.net/patches/lki.html This documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. "Cluster" is an ambiguous term in computer industry. Depending on the vendor and specific contexts, a cluster may refer to wide a variety of environments. In general a cluster refers to a set of computer systems connected together. For the purposes of this book a cluster is set of computers which are connected to each other, and are physically located close to each other, in order to solve problems more efficiently. These types of clusters are also referred to as High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, or simply Compute clusters. Another popular usage of the term cluster is to describe High Availability environments. In this environment a computer system acts as the backup system to one or more primary systems. When there is a failure in a primary system, the critical applications running on that system are failed over to its designated backup system. Detailed usage and technology behind these types of clusters is outside the scope of this book. The Big Online Book of Linux Ada Programming The Linux operating system that was created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus, interested in the UNIX clone operating system Minix, wanted to create an expanded version of Minix with more capabilities. He began his work in 1991 when he released version 0.02 and invited programmers to participate in his project. Version 1.0 was released in 1994. The latest version is 2.4 and development continues. Linux uses GNU General Public License (GPL) and its source code is freely available to everyone. Linux distributions, CD-ROMs with the Linux kernel and various other software ready for installation, do not have to be free, but the Linux source code must remain available. Making source code available is known as 'open source'. Posted on: April 1, 2008 If you enjoyed this post then why not add us on Google+? Add us to your Circles
Dental Hygienist Certification and Licensure Proper training is essential for dental hygienists who are often called upon to perform the vast majority of their patient's hands-on dental care. Common tasks for dental hygienists include performing basic dental procedures such as cleaning, applying sealants and fluoride, and taking dental x-rays. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.gov), these tasks may be performed with or without direct supervision by a licensed dentist. Most of the skills required by dental hygienists can be learned in an accredited dental hygiene school. However, some of the skills required for dental hygiene, such as compassion and interpersonal skills, can be learned nearly anywhere. In addition to learning the hands-on skills required for a career in dental hygiene and an appropriate bedside manner, all dental hygienists must also become licensed in order to practice in the profession. The following article details how licensure works and why it is essential for anyone pursuing this career. Dental hygiene educational requirements According to the American Dental Association, dental hygienists generally receive their associate or bachelor's degree in dental hygiene by attending dental hygiene programs offered by community colleges, universities or technical schools. A few schools may offer dental hygiene certification programs, but they generally require the same amount of study as associate degree programs. Upon completion of a dental hygiene program, students must then take the National Board Dental Hygiene Examination and apply for licensure in their state. Other requirements for licensure vary from state to state, but can include: - Graduation from an accredited dental hygiene program - Passing grade on the National Board Dental Hygiene Examination - Passing grade on any applicable regional or state clinical board examination - Proof of CPR certification - A recommendation letter from dentists in the state where you plan to work - High school and college transcripts - Official letters from board of dentistry Benefits of dental hygiene licensure Professional certification in the dental hygiene profession generally comes in the form of licensure. According to the BLS, all dental hygienists must gain licensure in their state in order to work in their chosen profession, though licensing requirements can vary greatly from state to state. Becoming licensed as a dental hygienist not only makes a career in dental hygiene possible, but it also protects the dental industry and dental patients by ensuring high standards and uniformity for all dental procedures and basic care. Completion of all licensing requirements in your state means you are then allowed to use "R.D.H." after your name in order to show that you are a Registered Dental Hygienist. This designation should be displayed with pride since it shows that you have completed all licensing requirements and displayed your proficiency and knowledge of dental hygiene and patient care. Dental Hygienists, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014-15 Edition, January 8, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dental-hygienists.htm#tab-1 Dental Hygienist Education and Training Requirements, American Dental Association, 2014, http://www.ada.org/en/education-careers/careers-in-dentistry/dental-team-careers/dental-hygienist/education-training-requirements-dental-hygienist Licensure, American Dental Hygiene Association, 2014, http://www.adha.org/licensure
\|\|Draw a straight line that begins on the left side of the clockface between 9 and 10 and cuts across the clockface to the right side between 3 and 4. The sum of the numbers above the line equals 39, and the sum of the numbers below the line equals Based on a puzzle inThe World's Best Puzzlesby Charles Barry Townsend. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1986.
SOFIA Seeks Secrets of Planetary Birth November 19, 2009: You don't always have to have a rocket to do rocket science. Sometimes a mere airplane will do – that is, a mere Boeing 747 toting a 17-ton, 9-foot wide telescope named SOFIA. Short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA will observe the universe while gliding through the stratosphere at 45,000 feet. When it begins operations next year, it will be the world's biggest, most advanced airborne observatory. Right: NASA's SOFIA infrared observatory 747SP overflies its home, the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. Credit: NASA/Jim Ross. "SOFIA is set to achieve some spectacular science," says project scientist Pamela Marcum. "For instance, this telescope will help us figure out how planets form and how our own solar system came to be." And as a mobile observatory, it can fly anywhere, anytime. SOFIA can move into position to capture especially interesting astronomical events such as stellar occultations (when celestial objects cross in front of background stars), while ground-based telescopes fastened to the "wrong" geographic locations on Earth's surface miss the show. SOFIA will fly above the veil of water vapor1 that surrounds Earth to take a wide-eyed look at the cosmos. Below: (Left) SOFIA's 2.5-meter infrared telescope peers out from its cavity in the rear fuselage. (Right) A close-up of the German-built telescope assembly. Photo credit: NASA/Tom Tschida. Larger images:#1, #2. Although our galaxy teems with planetary systems, astronomers don't know exactly how they form. That's because ordinary telescopes can't see through the giant, dense clouds of gas and dust that spawn planets. Using infrared wavelengths, SOFIA can pierce the haze and watch the birthing process – showing scientists how molecules come together to construct worlds. "SOFIA will be able to locate the 'planetary snowline,' where water vapor turns to ice in the disk of dust and gas around young stars," says Marcum. "That's important because we think that's where gas giants are born. The most massive planetary cores are fashioned [around the snowline] because conditions are best for rock and ice to build up." (Sticky ice particles help form planets just as they help you make a snowball to hurl at an unsuspecting friend.) "Once a large enough core forms, its gravity becomes strong enough to hold on to gas so more hydrogen and helium molecules can 'stick.' Then these large cores can grow into gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Otherwise, they remain as smaller rock-ice planets." "SOFIA will also be able to pinpoint where basic building blocks like oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide2 are located within the protoplanetary disk." Knowing where various substances are located in the disk will cast light on how they come together, from the "ground" up, to form planets. One of the telescope's key strengths is its ability to complement other infrared observatories. With a 20-year lifetime, it can do follow up studies on objects shorter-lived infrared scopes don't have time to hone in on. If, for example, an orbiting observatory like WISE spots something deserving of more attention, SOFIA can move in for a long, slow look, while WISE continues gazing at the rest of the sky. (Note: For more information about WISE, check out the recent Science@NASA story "In Search of Dark Asteroids and Other Sneaky Things.") "WISE is designed to scan the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, gathering survey data for multitudes of objects rather than studying targeted objects in great depth," explains Marcum. "But SOFIA has time to spare for deeper studies." Below: To illustrate how infrared sensors can see things the human eye cannot, Marcum offers these white light vs. IR images of a warm-blooded dog and a cold-blooded lizard. [larger image] SOFIA can also do follow-up science to reap the full benefits of discoveries from Herschel's deep spatial surveys, and later, the James Webb Space Telescope's near- to mid-infrared investigations. "Once Herschel runs out of its 3-year supply of coolant, SOFIA will be the only observatory routinely providing coverage within the far-infrared to submillimeter wavelength range. This part of the spectrum is largely unexplored territory." "And although SOFIA covers the same part of the spectrum James Webb (JWST) covers, SOFIA is optimized for wavelengths just beyond JWST to complement its observations. SOFIA will do a bang-up job observing between the JWST and Herschel wavelength gap." Unlike these space-based scopes, SOFIA can "head back to the barn" periodically for instruments to be repaired, adjusted, or even swapped out for new and improved science instruments – keeping pace with cutting edge science from a "mere" airplane. \|footnotes and more information\| For more information on SOFIA's science mission, see http://www.sofia.usra.edu. 2SOFIA has an exceptional ability to finely separate out and distinguish different infrared wavelengths, allowing it to capture these spectra. * SOFIA is a joint program between NASA and the German Space Agency, Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt, Bonn, Germany. The SOFIA program is managed by NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.; the aircraft is based at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility, Palmdale, Calif. NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., manages the SOFIA science and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, Md., and the Deutsches SOFIA Institute, Stuttgart, Germany. * Plans are in the works for writers and teachers to be invited to join scientists with SOFIA up where the air is thin. * How do you keep a telescope still enough to point accurately and stay "on point" in a moving airplane? "First, SOFIA's plane will fly in the relatively stable stratosphere," says Marcum. "Also, we have a clever vibration isolation system. The mirror is mechanically isolated from the plane. Shock absorbers, serving the same purpose as those found in a automobile, surround the giant bearing that bears the telescope's weight, isolating the mirror from vibration in all directions."
Speak Up About Dizziness Dizziness may feel like: - Vertigo or spinning - Rocking or swaying - Being unsteady or off-balance - Weak in the knees Causes of dizziness include: - Postural hypotension - Low blood sugar - Vision problems - Inner ear problems When you are dizzy: - Do not drive a car. - Sit or lie down immediately. - Use a cane for stability, if needed. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist about medications that may cause dizziness. Move your arms and tighten your thigh muscles,m then slowly get up after lying in bed or sitting in a chair. Ask your healthcare provider to test your blood pressure lying down and standing up. Avoid dehydration: drink 6-8 glasses of fluids including water each day or as directed by your healthcare provider. Rest in a cool place and drink water or a sports drink if your dizziness is caused by overheating or dehydration. Eat a healthy diet: 3 balanced meals and snacks in between. Keep regular sleep hours: 7-8 hours of sleep every night and avoid stress. Avoid using caffeine, alcohol, salt, and tobacco. Excessive use of these substances can worsen your dizziness.
In 1992, a law professor named Monroe Freedman published an article in Legal Times, a magazine for practitioners. He asserted that Atticus Finch, the iconic hero of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys. Lee had portrayed Finch as zealously representing a black man, Tom Robinson, despite intense disapproval from many whites. What’s more, Robinson was accused of having raped a white woman. Not only did Finch ably defend Robinson in court; one evening he also faced down a mob that sought to abduct the defendant from jail in order to lynch him. Generations have admired Finch for his fidelity to due process even at the risk of unpopularity and personal harm. Freedman noted, however, that Finch did not volunteer to represent Robinson; he did so only upon assignment by the court, saying that he had “hoped to get through life without a case of this kind.” Freedman also pointed out that Finch abstained from challenging the obvious illicit racial exclusion of blacks from the jury that wrongly convicted Robinson and the racial segregation in the courtroom itself, where blacks were confined to the balcony. At the time of this fictional trial, there would have been good strategic reasons for forgoing objection to these customs. Confrontation would have had little chance at success and a large likelihood of provoking retaliation against the defendant. In Freedman’s view, however, those considerations were not decisive in influencing Atticus Finch. Rather, Freedman inferred that Finch failed to oppose Jim Crow custom because he was at home with it. He told his children that the Ku Klux Klan was merely “a political organization” and that the leader of the lynch mob was “basically a good man” albeit with “blind spots along with the rest of us.” To Freedman, Finch’s acts and omissions defined a lawyer who lived his life as a “passive participant” in “pervasive injustice.” This column by a legal academic, published in a relatively obscure trade journal, so enraged admirers of Atticus Finch that this newspaper published an article about the column and the impassioned responses it provoked. Dismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman’s impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself. The most dramatic feature of her “new” novel, “Go Set a Watchman” — written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” but published 55 years afterward — is the revelation that Atticus, the supposed paragon of probity, courage and wisdom, was a white supremacist. In the mid-1930s, when the events of “To Kill a Mockingbird” transpire, white dominance was so completely established that Finch could blithely disregard any political dissatisfactions blacks felt and still get credit from his adoring daughter — and from millions of readers — for defending an innocent man. Two decades later, when the events of “Go Set a Watchman” take place, white dominance has been shaken. Blacks are demanding the vote and attacking racial segregation. Finch’s previous unflappable patrician calm now gives way to defensive anxiety. He defends segregationist propaganda with titles like “The Black Plague.” He derides the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), especially its lawyers. He rails against the prospect of blacks leaving their “place.” “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” he asks his daughter, Jean Louise (also known affectionately as Scout). “Do you want them in our world?” He veers between expressing condescension — “Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people” — and expressing contempt: “Can you blame the South for wanting to resist an invasion by people who are apparently so ashamed of their race they want to get rid of it?” The audience for these questions, Jean Louise, the grown-up Scout, is bereft of her beloved childhood companions. Jem, her brother, has suffered the fate of their mother: death at an early age from a sudden heart attack. Her mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, is gone; and Dill, Scout and Jem’s irrepressible summertime chum (a character modeled on Lee’s longtime friend Truman Capote), is largely absent too. The most striking new presence is Henry Clinton, a hard-working young lawyer in Atticus’s practice who hopes to marry Jean Louise. She appears to be on the verge of succumbing when she learns to her dismay that Henry, like Atticus, is a member of the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council. Established in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, White Citizens’ Councils were tonier alternatives to the Klan. They were designed to be respectable organizations that would enable businessmen and professionals to thwart racial desegregation. Henry figures in two of the most memorable scenes in the novel. In one, he climbs a water tower to save Jean Louise. Still ignorant about sex as a sixth grader, she believes she is pregnant because a boy at school put his tongue in her mouth. She considers jumping off the water tower to commit suicide to spare her family disgrace. In another scene, Henry escorts Jean Louise to the high school prom. She is wearing falsies that stray. “Her right false bosom was in the center of her chest, and the other was nearly under her left armpit.” He hugs her close to prevent others from seeing what has happened, comforts her outside of the school gymnasium, and throws the falsies away. When they land on a sign honoring students who have joined the armed forces after graduation, the school’s outraged principal demands that the guilty party turn herself in. Henry, with Atticus’s counsel, concocts a scheme in which each of the girls at the school writes a note saying the offending falsies look like her own, ensuring that no one bears the full weight of the principal’s anger. Although “Go Set a Watchman” sporadically generates the literary force that has buoyed “To Kill a Mockingbird” for over half a century, the new novel is not nearly as gripping as the courtroom drama and coming-of-age story it eventually became. The first hundred pages are largely desultory, though they do create a sense of anticipation. Then Lee begins to introduce the reader to Jean Louise’s discovery that Atticus and Henry have joined the White Citizens’ Council. Her disappointment, which develops into anger, suggests an opportunity to explore a dense, rich, complicated subject: How should you deal with someone who has loved you unstintingly when you find out that this same person harbors ugly, dangerous social prejudices? Unfortunately, Lee’s response is uninspired. In an ending that is all too compressed, she portrays Jean Louise as teetering between a moral revulsion that makes her love for Atticus and Henry impossible and an acceptance of the men despite their racism. Lee’s rendering of Jean Louise’s ambivalence is undeveloped. One yearns for a narrative that conveys the contending emotions with vividness and detail, as the heroine grapples with the intricacies of the problem: Is it wrong to revoke affection because of disgust with the ideology of someone who has nurtured you all your life? Is it intolerably dictatorial to impose a political litmus test on loved ones? Is it complacent to refuse to? If morality compels censuring the retrograde beliefs and conduct of lovers, friends and family, how should that be done? And then what? Alas, in “Go Set a Watchman,” the reader is given only a sketch in which Jean Louise is hurriedly made to try on one reaction and then another without earned resolution or depth. Would it have been better for this earlier novel to have remained unpublished? Though it does not represent Harper Lee’s best work, it does reveal more starkly the complexity of Atticus Finch, her most admired character. “Go Set a Watchman” demands that its readers abandon the immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school lessons about the nobility of the white savior and the mesmerizing performance of Gregory Peck in the film adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But the conversation doesn’t end with Monroe Freedman’s complaint about Atticus Finch’s limitations or with Jean Louise’s disillusionment with her previously idolized father. After Lee sold the manuscript we’re now reading, she worked hard on revisions. At her editor’s urging, she shifted the novel’s time frame from the 1950s to the Depression, away from the messy adult problems of a young woman coming to understand the racism of her father, and back to childhood, where seen through Scout’s eyes, Atticus Finch could become the hero that millions of readers love. The editor’s shrewd suggestion belonged to a specific time and place, too. In America in 1960, the story of a decent white Southerner who defends an innocent black man charged with raping a white woman had the appeal of a fairy tale and the makings of a popular movie. Perhaps even more promising, though, was the novel Lee first envisioned, the story of Jean Louise’s adult conflicts between love and fairness, decency and loyalty. Fully realized, that novel might have become a modern masterpiece.
Bunty spends several hours watching his favourite cartoons on TV or play video games. He is fast becoming a couch potato and his parents blame the TV for it. The clan of kids like Bunty is increasing at an alarming rate. Such kids would rather spend the time watching their favourite cartoon than go down and play. Lack of physical activity among children is one of the factors that are contributing to increase in childhood obesity. But researchers at the Oregon State University [OSU] find that there’s no point blaming the TV; it is parents who are responsible for the child’s activity levels. The OSU research team studied the behaviours of about 200 families to find that across all parenting styles, children just sat for four to five hours a day. “This is waking hours not including naps or feeding. Some parents counted quiet play—sitting and coloring or working on a puzzle—as a positive activity, but this is an age where movement is essential,” said lead author David Schary. Unfortunately, all the children who were found sitting for several hours in a day were between ages two and four. They found that while all the children in their study got more than required screen time, children who had “neglectful” parents, or whose parents weren’t home often, were spending 30 minutes more watching TV on an average each week day. “A half an hour each day may not seem like much, but add that up over a week, then a month, and then a year and you have a big impact,” Schary said. “One child may be getting up to four hours more active play every week, and this sets the stage for the rest of their life.” Weekends were in fact worse, as sedentary time increased nearly one hour each weekend day. According to Bradley Cardinal, study co-author, sedentary behavior goes against the natural tendencies of most preschool-age children. “Toddlers and preschool-age children are spontaneous movers, so it is natural for them to have bursts of activity many minutes per hour,” he said. “We find that when kids enter school, their levels of physical activity decrease and overall, it continues to decline throughout their life. Early life movement is imperative for establishing healthy, active lifestyle patterns, self-awareness, social acceptance, and even brain and cognitive development,” said Cardinal. In a separate study both authors found that even driving the children to active play activities encourages them to be active. Spot an error in this article? A typo maybe? Or an incorrect source? Let us know!
So-called marginal leaf fold galls are appearing on oaks in the "red oak group" in southwest Ohio. The galls appear as rolled or folded leaf margins and are produced by a gall-making midge fly, Macrodiplosis erubescens (Family Cecidomyiidae). As with the vast majority of oak galls, the leaf fold galls cause no appreciable harm to the overall health of affected oaks. However, the gall has become notorious in recent years for its connection to a non-native predaceous mite (Pyemotes herfsi) that may feed on the gall-making midge fly larvae (maggots). The mite has been implicated in itchy outbreaks in past years in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago as well as various locations in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. The tiny mites use their piercing mouthparts (chelicerae) to inject a powerful neurotoxin to dispatch the midge fly maggots. They then feed vampire-like by extracting the essence of maggot. When all of the maggots have been killed, or when the surviving maggots drop from the galls to the ground to complete their development, the starving mites drop from the trees in search of food. Unfortunately, the famished mites become "itch mites" if they land on people. They will bite and their neurotoxin induces itchy skin welts that may last for several days. Most bites occur beneath shirt collars on the back of the neck. Unfortunately, research has not revealed conditions that favor high mite populations, so there is no way to predict itchy outbreaks.
Date of Award Master of Education (MEd) in Curriculum and Instruction Science education has seen a major overhaul with the implementation of ideas from the NRC’s (2012) report, A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. At the same time, we have seen a rise in the number of formal educational facilities partnering with informal facilities to bring these practices to students. This study explored the effect these blended approaches had on both student attitudes and their achievement in science content areas. To do this, surveys were designed to assess these areas in upper elementary students participating in a one-year blended science program. First, the literature was examined to develop themes around which the survey questions could be built. A sample, N=78, was pooled from anonymous student surveys returned after the program’s completion. From this data, descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations were generated using SPSS software. While the research results did not support or disprove a relationship between attitude and achievement, it did show a positive correlation between a student’s age and confidence in their ability to do science. A positive correlation between enjoying science and viewing science as a tool that makes sense of the world was also found. Professional development efforts should note that previous studies have shown growth in both attitude and achievement from blended programs and continue to research this area. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Crawford, Kellie Michelle, "Informal science in the classroom: how informal and formal educational institutions support science instruction" (2018). EWU Masters Thesis Collection. 534.
There are three main reasons why the search for the historical Jesus began (of three searches). The first is the problems raised in the Gospels such as consistency, apparent contradictions, historical accuracy, etc. Then there was the problem posed by the Reformation in completely changing the perspective on the Bible and Jesus. Finally, there was the current worldview of modernity. This led many to believe that the Gospels do not give an accurate portrayal of the real Jesus, which caused the need to search through all the sources to find the historical Jesus. The first search was from 1778-1906. Rationalism and deism became the dominant epistemology and worldviews in the eighteenth century. In 1778 Hermann Reimarus wrote On the Intention of Jesus and the Disciples and was the first to make the distinction between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history. A gap began to form between history and faith. Numerous other fictions “lives” of Jesus were written throughout the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. These writers included K.F. Bardht (1792), K.H. Venturini (1809), and Heinrich Paulus (1828). Venturini claimed that Jesus was just a member of the Essenes, that the miracles were staged, and that he was crucified but did not die. Paulus took a rationalistic approach and attempted to give natural explanations for the miracles. All these writings were speculative in explanatory hypotheses but generally accepted the Gospels as substantially accurate. At the age of 28, David F. Strauss (1808-1874) wrote Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835) and was the first major figure to suggest that the Gospels are largely fictitious because of the miracle claims. He claimed that the Gospels were designed to teach transcendental moral truths taught by followers and not Jesus. “The historical Jesus was thus turned into the divine Messiah by the pious, but erroneous devotion of the church.” Thus, we have the the development of source criticism, which attempted to trace the record of the literary sources of the Gospels. The synoptic problem became a major talking point: How do we account for the similarities and the differences between the synoptic Gospels? The Gospels were claimed to have been based on earlier written sources: What are these and how do they relate together to form the Gospel accounts we have? Thus, we have the two document hypothesis. Mark, the earliest Gospel, gives the framework but lacks much of the teaching. In 1890 the “Q” (from the German word for source, Quelle) hypothesis claimed that this document, Q, was the primary sources that contained many of the sayings and teachings. The Q hypothesis suggested that Matthew took elements from Mark, Q, and Matthew’s unique contributions. Luke had elements of Mark and Q while adding his own unique material. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) wrote The Quest for the Historical Jesus. In this work he argued that Jesus was not a moral reformer and rejected Strauss and his followers. Instead, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, proclaiming the end of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God. Historically, Jesus is unknowable and we can never get back to the real Jesus and we don’t need to. Schweitzer brought the end of the first search for the historical Jesus. There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that he is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He is destroyed by them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. Schweitzer, Quest for the Historical Jesus, 370-371.
Reprinted from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia with permission of the author and the Jewish Women’s Archive. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, there were many reasons not to celebrate sex. The fear of AIDS brought to the surface the connection between passion and death that has always been a dark strain in the human mind. A fundamentalist Christian reaction against the sexual revolution threatened to re-enthrone Puritan values. On the other side of the coin, millions of children were bearing children, many of them damaged by drug and alcohol abuse. Against this desolate background, a cheerful Jewish grandmother who called herself Dr. Ruth marched forward and said, with undeniable sincerity and forthright common sense, that sex was good, indeed “heavenly.” To the astonishment of many Americans, who tend to associate religion with sexual repression, Ruth Westheimer declared that her message of liberation had its origin in Orthodox Judaism. Karola Ruth Siegel was born in Germany on June 4, 1928, the daughter of Irma Hanauer, a housekeeper, and Julius Siegel, a notions wholesaler and son of the family in which Irma worked. Julius Siegel gave his daughter an early grounding in Judaism, taking her regularly to the synagogue in Frankfurt, where they lived. When Karola was ten years old, shortly after the infamous Kristallnacht, her father was taken to a detention camp. Her mother and grandmother then sent the little girl to Switzerland, where she lived in an orphanage for six years. After the war, unable to find any other members of her family, sixteen-year-old Karola went to Palestine. There, she lived on a number of kibbutzim and joined the Haganah, the underground army. Later, she taught kindergarten, before going with her first husband to Paris, where she studied at the Institute of Psychology at the Sorbonne. After a divorce, she came to the United States. In New York, she entered the New School for Social Research on a scholarship for victims of the Holocaust. While studying, she married her second husband and gave birth to her first child, Miriam. After a second divorce, she met Manfred Westheimer. They were married in December of 1961, and their son Joel was born in 1964. The next year, Ruth Westheimer became an American citizen and, in 1970, received her Ed.D. from Columbia University. After working in a number of positions involving sex education, family planning, and sex therapy, Westheimer found her niche when she did a guest appearance on a local radio show. The audience response was so positive that she was soon hosting her own show, Sexually Speaking. Beginning in 1980 as a fifteen-minute embellishment to the station’s schedule, it quickly expanded to an hour and finally to two hours. Westheimer proved to have a real genius for communicating joy in human sexuality while at the same time informing her audiences about responsibility, sexually transmitted diseases, and safe sex. The diminutive woman with her appealing accent was equally successful on television. She hosted her own program–variously called Good Sex! with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, The Dr. Ruth Show, and Ask Dr. Ruth–but her national reputation came from appearances on such network programs as Nightline, CBS Evening News, the Tonight Show, and Late Night with David Letterman. In 1983, Westheimer published her first book, Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex. Since then, she has written twenty-six others, including her autobiographical works All in a Lifetime (1987) and Musically Speaking: A Life through Song (2003). Sex and Judaism In 1995, Westheimer coauthored Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition, with Jonathan Mark. Drawing on traditional Judaic sources, it grounds the famous sex therapist’s philosophy in Orthodox Jewish teaching. While some have suggested that the authors ignored the darker side of the classical Jewish dialectic on the subject, it is difficult to ignore the cultural significance of both the book and Dr. Ruth. As David Biale asked, “What does it mean for America’s best-known sex therapist to make Judaism the basis of a contemporary sex ethic? If Freud had claimed to have created the science of sexuality by destroying the ‘illusion’ of religion, Dr. Ruth reverses the course: It is precisely on the basis of religion–Judaism–that a truly healthy contemporary science of sexuality might be constructed.” In 1991 Westheimer donned the title of “executive producer” for a documentary on Ethiopian Jews entitled Surviving Salvation. Her second PBS documentary, entitled No Missing Link, described how grandparents transmitted values, particularly religious values, during the seventy years of communism in Russia. In 1994 Westheimer entered cyberspace with Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex on CD-ROM. Two hundred and fifty entries deal straightforwardly with all areas of sex and sexuality. Westheimer followed it up with Sex for Dummies, in the famous series of how-to manuals. She told USA Today that her first reaction to the idea of the book was negative. “When they approached me, I said, ‘Absolutely no, I do not talk to dummies. I talk to intelligent people.'” She changed her mind, however, when she recognized the irony of the titles and their disarming appeal to a wide segment of the population. “And then I said, hold it, if I can prevent one unintended pregnancy, one person from getting AIDS, one person from getting a sexually transmitted disease, it will be worth it.” Overcoming All Obstacles This determinedly optimistic, affirmative, and wholesome approach leaves Westheimer open to criticism and satire. It is a testament to the endurance of the human spirit that someone who was exposed to the horrors of humanity and experienced great sorrow at an early age is able to look away from the darkness and toward the light. As she told a Reuters interviewer at the 1995 Frankfurt Book Fair, “I was kicked out in 1939 by being placed on a train right here in Frankfurt…. I never saw my parents again. Every time I am sad I just have to think about my five-year-old grandson. Hitler didn’t want me to have that grandson. I put the picture of my grandson in my mind and say–You see, we did triumph. So I do therapy on myself.” In May of 2000 Westheimer received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College-Institute of Religion for her work in human sexuality and her commitment to the Jewish people, Israel and religion. In 2001 she received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Leo Baeck Medal, and in 2004, she received the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Trinity College. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and an Associate Fellow of Calhoun College at Yale University. Ruth Westheimer is the president of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) of Washington Heights.
Gymnastics is a sport involving the performance of sequences of movements requiring physical strength, flexibility, balance, endurance, gracefulness, and kinesthetic awareness, such as handsprings, handstands, split leaps, aerials and cartwheels. Gymnastics evolved from beauty practices and fitness regimes used by the ancient Greeks, including skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and circus performance skills. Since its entrance into the United States in 1830, it has rapidly evolved into a perennial Olympic sport. Gymnastics is a sport that harmonizes body movement to the lilting tunes of choreographed music, very much like a form of art. Gymnastics events test the strength, rhythm, balance, flexibility and agility of the gymnast, demanding an intense level of self-discipline. The history of gymnastics dates back several thousand years ago, to the Greek civilization. The word gymnastics comes from the ancient Greek word "gymnos" meaning naked. To the Ancient Greeks, physical fitness was paramount, and all Greek cities had a gymnasia, a courtyard for jumping, running, and wrestling. As the Roman Empire ascended, Greek gymnastics gave way to military training. The ancient Romans, for example, introduced the wooden horse. In 393 C.E. the Emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympic Games, which by then had become corrupt, and gymnastics, along with other sports declined. Later, Christianity, with its medieval belief in the base nature of the human body, had a deleterious effect on gymnastics. For centuries, gymnastics was all but forgotten. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, two pioneer physical educators – Johann Friedrich GutsMuth (1759 – 1839) and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778 – 1852), considered the father of modern gymnastics - created exercises for boys and young men on apparatus they designed that ultimately led to what is considered modern gymnastics. In particular, Jahn crafted early models of the horizontal bar, the parallel bars (from a horizontal ladder with the rungs removed), and the vaulting horse. By the end of the nineteenth century, men's gymnastics competition was popular enough to be included in the first "modern" Olympic Games in 1896. However, from then, and up until the early 1950s, both national and international competitions involved a changing variety of exercises gathered under the rubric gymnastics that would seem strange to today's audiences: synchronized team floor calisthenics, rope climbing, high jumping, running, horizontal ladder, etc. During the 1920s, women organized and participated in gymnastics events, and the first women's Olympic competition – primitive, for it involved only synchronized calisthenics - was held at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam. By the 1954 Olympic Games, apparatus and events for both men and women had been standardized in modern format, and uniform grading structures (including a point system from 1 to 10) had been agreed upon. At this time, Soviet gymnasts astounded the world with highly disciplined and difficult performances, setting a precedent that continues to inspire. The new medium of television helped publicize and initiate a modern age of gymnastics. Both men's and women's gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on every continent. Nadia Comaneci received the first perfect score, at the 1976 Olympic Games held in Montreal, Canada. She was coached by the famous Romanian, Bela Karolyi. According to Sports Illustrated, Comaneci scored four of her perfect tens on the uneven bars, two on the balance beam and one in the floor exercise. Unfortunately, even with Nadia's perfect scores, the Romanians lost the gold medal to the Soviets. Nadia will always be remembered as "a fourteen year old, ponytailed little girl" who showed the world that perfection could be achieved. In 2006, a new points system was put into play. Instead of being marked 1 to 10, the gymnast's start value depends on the difficulty rating of the exercise routine. Also, the deductions became higher: before the new point system developed, the deduction for a fall was 0.5, and now it is 0.8. The motivation for a new point system was to decrease the chance of gymnasts getting a perfect score. Artistic Gymnastics is usually divided into Men's and Women's Gymnastics, with each doing a different rotation of events; Men compete on Floor Exercise, Pommel Horse, Still Rings, Vault, Parallel Bars, and High Bar, while women compete on Vault, Uneven Bars, Balance Beam, and Floor Exercise. In some countries, women at one time competed on the rings, high bar, and parallel bars (for example, in the 1950s in the USSR). Though routines performed on each event may be short, they are physically exhausting and push the gymnast's strength, flexibility, endurance and awareness to the limit. Traditionally, at the international level, competitions on the various apparatus consisted of two different performance categories: compulsory and optional. For the compulsory event, each gymnast performing on a specific apparatus executes the same required routine. At the optional level, the gymnast performed routines that he or she choreographed. Currently, each country may use compulsory and optional routines at their discretion in the training of young gymnasts. At the compulsory levels gymnasts are judged on a scale of 10, but as they reach the higher levels, particularly levels 9 and 10, the gymnasts' start-values may vary depending upon a number of different factors such as skill level and skill combinations. Also, every skill has a letter grade describing its difficulty. At level nine, to reach a start value of ten, the gymnast has to acquire bonus points, which she can achieve by connecting two or more skills of a certain level of difficulty. Compulsory levels of gymnastics have choreographed routines, and all women competing at that level do the same routines. Compulsory levels go from 1-6; most gymnasts start at levels 2-4. Optional levels, however, are all different and have different floor music. Optional levels are 7-10 (elite). The Olympics and college level gymnastics are also optional. In the Olympics, gymnasts compete at elite, which is higher than Level 10. As with the women, male gymnasts are also judged on all of their events, through performance and presentation. General gymnastics enables people of all ages and abilities to participate in performance groups of 6 to more than 150 athletes. They perform synchronized, choreographed routines. Troupes may be all one gender or mixed. There are no age divisions in general gymnastics. The largest general gymnastics exhibition is the quadrennial World Gymnaestrada which was first held in 1939. The discipline of rhythmic gymnastics is currently only competed by women (although there is a new version of this discipline for men being pioneered in Japan, see Men's rhythmic gymnastics), and involves the performance of five separate routines with the use of five apparatus—ball, ribbon, hoop, clubs, rope—on a floor area, with a much greater emphasis on the aesthetic rather than the acrobatic. Rhythmic routines are scored out of a possible 20 points, and the music used by the gymnast can contain vocals, but may not contain words. Aerobic gymnastics (formally Sport Aerobics} involves the performance of routines by individuals, pairs, trios or groups up to 6 people, emphasizing strength, flexibility, and aerobic fitness rather than acrobatic or balance skills. Routines are performed on a small floor area and generally last 60-90 seconds. Trampolining consists of four events: individual, synchronized, double mini and trampoline. Only individual trampoline is included in the Olympics. Individual routines involve a build-up phase during which the gymnast jumps repeatedly to achieve height, followed by a sequence of ten leaps without pauses during which the gymnast performs a sequence of aerial tumbling skills. Routines are marked out of a maximum score of 10 points. Additional points (with no maximum) can be earned depending on the difficulty of the moves. Synchronized trampoline is similar except that both competitors must perform the routine together and marks are awarded for synchronicity as well as the form of the moves. Double mini trampoline involves a smaller trampoline with a run-up, two moves are performed and the scores marked in a similar manner to individual trampoline. Acrobatic Gymnastics (formerly Sports Acrobatics), often referred to as acrobatics, "acro" sports or simply sports acro, is a group gymnastic discipline for both men and women. Acrobats in groups of two, three and four perform routines with the heads, hands and feet of their partners. They may pick their own music, but lyrics or Disney music are not allowed. Performers must compete in preparatory grades A and B, then move on to grades 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; by 3, 4 and 5 two routines are required, one for balances and another for tempos. Generally, competitors climbed either a 6m (6.1m = 20 ft in USA) or an 8m (7.6m = 25 ft in USA), 38mm (1.5") diameter natural fiber rope for speed, starting from a seated position on the floor and using only the hands and arms. Kicking the legs in a kind of "stride" was normally permitted. Flying Rings was an event similar to Still Rings, but with the performer swinging back and forth while executing a series of stunts. It was a gymnastic event sanctioned by both the NCAA and the AAU until the early 1960s. Gymnastics is considered to be a dangerous sport, due in part to the height of the apparatus, the speed of the exercises, and the impact on competitors' joints, bones and muscles. In several cases, competitors have suffered serious, lasting injuries and paralysis after severe gymnastics-related accidents. For instance, in 1998, world-class Chinese artistic gymnast Sang Lan was paralyzed after falling on vault at the Goodwill Games. Artistic gymnastics injuries have been the subject of several international medical studies, and results have indicated that more than half of all elite-level participants may eventually develop chronic injuries. In the United States, injury rates range from a high 56 percent for high school gymnasts to 23 percent for club gymnasts. However, the rates for participants in recreational or lower-level gymnastics are lower than that of high-level competitors. Conditioning, secure training environments with mats and knowledgeable coaching can also lessen the frequency or occurrence of injuries. All links retrieved January 24, 2014. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here: Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.
Peanut Allergy Therapy Loses Effect After Stopping Peanut is one of the most common food allergies. Some studies show oral immunotherapy (OIT) can prevent life-threatening allergic reactions. But a new study shows that OIT’s protection doesn’t always last if it is stopped or reduced. Peanut allergy is caused by your immune system (the body’s defense system) mistakenly treating peanut proteins as harmful. OIT involves eating small amounts of peanut protein. These doses slowly increase over time. This helps your body gradually get used to, or tolerate, peanut. Researchers carried out a three-year study with 120 people with peanut allergy. Participants ranged in age from 7 to 55. After two years, most people (83%) given peanut OIT were able to eat peanut without an allergic reaction. The researchers then stopped the therapy or reduced the dose to see if its effects lasted. One year later, only 13% of those who had stopped OIT could still tolerate peanut. And only 37% on the reduced peanut dose still had protection. “We hope that, with more research, blood tests can help us predict who may respond to OIT treatment,” says NIH researcher Dr. Alkis Togias. Researchers continue to study and develop ways to prevent and treat food allergy. Never give peanut products to someone with an allergy on your own. OIT should only be given under a doctor’s care. NIH Office of Communications and Public Liaison Building 31, Room 5B52 Bethesda, MD 20892-2094 Editor: Harrison Wein, Ph.D. Managing Editor: Tianna Hicklin, Ph.D. Illustrator: Alan Defibaugh Attention Editors: Reprint our articles and illustrations in your own publication. Our material is not copyrighted. Please acknowledge NIH News in Health as the source and send us a copy.
For John and Jim Lavender, cattle producers in Tuscaloosa County, Ala., the drought that has covered Alabama could have devastated their livestock operation. While the drought has caused many producers to reduce herd size as well as buy supplemental feed for the remaining livestock, the Lavenders have approached the problem from another angle. They use a rotational grazing system, including some native grasses. That approach to grazing has proved very profitable during these long, dry summers. The Lavenders have a “lean and mean” livestock operation. They feed very little hay during the winter or in periods of drought. They have implemented a rotational grazing system on their 200-acre farm that allows their 100 or so cow-calf pairs and a few bulls to graze most of the year. They rotate the cows between 16 pastures, five to 25 acres in size, allowing the cows to graze from two to seven days in each pasture, depending on the pasture size and available forage. Each pasture then rests three to four weeks. They have learned that even during dry times, the grasses in rotation continue to produce forage since they have a healthy root system. The majority of the pastures consist of bermudagrass, bahiagrass and Dallisgrass. Pastures are overseeded in the fall with ryegrass and clover. A newly planted novel endophyte tall fescue pasture is still developing. Two pastures are dedicated to annual plantings of ryegrass. Cows graze these pastures using intensive grazing techniques, strip grazing and limit grazing. Instead of harvesting hay from the bermudagrass pastures, the Lavenders allow the cows to graze it. In some pastures, the forage is allowed to grow in late summer and fall, stockpiling the forage for later use after a killing frost. In some years, this stockpiled forage has provided grazing into January, which significantly reduces the need for hay. When the cows are on the stock-piled bermudagrass, a protein supplement is provided to meet their nutritional requirements. In about 1995, the Lavenders decided to expand their forage options and experiment with several native warm season grass — Alamo switchgrass, Cave-in-Rock switchgrass and Indiangrass. From the varieties planted, the Alamo switchgrass has survived and is producing well for them. It was during the worst of the drought this year that John and Jim noticed the switchgrass was still green and actually growing. Other grasses like bahiagrass, bermudagrass or Dallisgrass were not growing and had turned brown. During the recent drought, forage was at a premium on the Lavender farm, but the switchgrass provided significant forage for their herd. As a result, they have been able to maintain their herd and the cattle have been grazing while many producers were feeding hay. The Lavenders have two pastures of switchgrass that they use for prescribed grazing. They have learned to manage the switchgrass to get the most efficient use of the forage. The growing points in switchgrass are elevated above the ground and must be protected to insure survival. For that reason, producers should turn the livestock into the pasture when the switchgrass is about 20 inches in height, and they should stop grazing when the forage is about 10 inches high. That means switchgrass must be carefully managed with a rotational grazing system. Continually overgrazing switchgrass will cause the stand to decline significantly and eventually die. Once established, however, a good stand of native warm-season grasses will last indefinitely if properly managed to give the grasses a competitive advantage over weeds. Native warm-season perennial grasses are a viable alternative to more traditional grasses like bahiagrass, bermudagrass or Dallisgrass. USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has cost-share programs that assist in establishing native grasses. Kent McCray, NRCS district conservationist, says, “Including native grasses in a grazing system provides flexibility. A commitment to proper planting and management is necessary. Switchgrass does well on a wide variety of soil types. Unlike cool-season grasses, it is drought tolerant and produces well on shallow, rocky soils.” This year could have been disastrous for the Lavenders. Instead, the grazing management alternatives they have implemented on their farm have proven to be invaluable, keeping their cows on the farm and helping to keep their operation solvent. For more information about establishing a grazing system or native grasses, contact your local USDA Service Center. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which is administered by NRCS, provides cost-share assistance for these practices.
(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved. Contact us for information about using this image. Mortars and pestles were used to crush parched corn into fine meal for traveling food and for use in stews, cakes, breads. This mortar and pestle is made of steatite or soapstone which is easier to shape than many other stones. Wooden mortars and pestles were also used but like other perishable materials, these were less likely to survive.
Progressives are deeply skeptical of federalism, and with good reason. States’ rights have been invoked to defend some of the most despicable institutions in American history, most notably slavery and Jim Crow. Many think “federalism” is just a code word for letting racists be racist. Progressives also associate federalism—and its less prominent companion, localism, which simply means decentralization within a state—with parochialism and the suppression of dissent. They thus look to national power, particularly the First and Fourteenth Amendments, to protect racial minorities and dissenters from threats posed at the local level. But it is a mistake to equate federalism’s past with its future. State and local governments have become sites of empowerment for racial minorities and dissenters, the groups that progressives believe have the most to fear from decentralization. In fact, racial minorities and dissenters can wield more electoral power at the local level than they do at the national. And while minorities cannot dictate policy outcomes at the national level, they can rule at the state and local level. Racial minorities and dissenters are using that electoral muscle to protect themselves from marginalization and promote their own agendas. Progressives have long looked to the realm of rights to shield racial minorities and dissenters from unfriendly majorities. Iconic measures like the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act all offer rights-based protections for minorities. But reliance on rights requires that racial minorities and dissenters look to the courts to shield them from the majority. If rights are the only protections afforded to racial minorities and dissenters, we risk treating both groups merely as what Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan calls “objects of judicial solicitude rather than efficacious political actors in their own right.” Minority rule, by contrast, allows racial minorities and dissenters to act as efficacious political actors, just as members of the majority do. Think, for example, about where groups we would normally call a “minority” now actually constitute a majority: a mostly African-American city like Atlanta, a city such as San Francisco where the majority favors same-sex marriage, or a state like California or Texas where Latinos will soon be in the majority. In each of those cases, minority rule—where national minorities constitute local majorities—allows minorities to protect themselves rather than look to courts as their source of solace. It empowers racial minorities and dissenters not by shielding them from the majority, but by turning them into one. Why should we care? We should care because the success of our democracy depends on two projects. The first is integration—ensuring that our fractious polity remains a polity. The second is dialogue—ensuring a healthy amount of debate and disagreement within our democracy. We have made progress on both fronts, but there is a great deal more work to do. Our social, political, and economic life still reflects racial divides. Our political system is immobilized; the issues that matter to everyday citizens are stuck in the frozen political tundra we call Washington. We have long looked to deeply rooted rights as tools for promoting equality and protecting dissent. But everyday politics can be just as important for pursuing these goals. We should look to minority rule, not just minority rights, as we build a better democracy. An emphasis on minority rule isn’t intended to denigrate the importance of minority rights. It is simply to insist that while rights are a necessary condition for equality, they may not be a sufficient one. Too often we assume in the context of race that rights alone will suffice, as if the path to equality moves straight from civic inclusion to full integration. We miss the possibility that there is an intermediary stage: empowerment. Such a strategy would be impossible without the hard-won battles of the civil rights movement. But it’s possible to believe in, even revere, the work of that movement and still wonder whether rights, standing alone, will bring us to full equality. Civic inclusion was the hardest fight. But it turns out that discrimination is a protean monster and more resistant to change than one might think. We may require new, even unexpected tools to combat discrimination before we reach genuine integration. Similarly, while the First Amendment has long been thought of as part of the bedrock of our democracy, it does not represent the only tool for furthering dialogue and nurturing dissent. Decentralization gives political outliers one of the most important powers a dissenter can enjoy—the power to force the majority to engage. It thus helps generate the deliberative froth needed to prevent national politics from becoming ossified or frozen by political elites uninterested in debating the hard questions that matter most to everyday voters. Federalism and Race Advocates of racial justice have long been skeptical of federalism. It is not hard to figure out why. The most important guarantors of racial equality—the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act—were passed at the national level and resisted at the local level. And it’s not just history that blinds us to the possibilities associated with decentralization and minority rule; our very idea of equality inspires wariness. We have a firm sense of what “integration” or “diversity” looks like: a statistical mirror. “Diversity” is a much-revered term for the idea that institutions should look like the community from which they are drawn—that they should “look like America,” to use one of Bill Clinton’s favorite phrases. We are thus quite dubious about institutions that depart from statistical mirroring, including those where racial minorities dominate. That skepticism runs so deep that it is inscribed in our very vocabulary. Our terminology is bimodal. We classify institutions as either “diverse” or “segregated.” The former is in all cases good, the latter in all cases bad. Thus, when racial minorities constitute statistical majorities, we call those institutions “segregated” and condemn them as such. Consider an example from the mainstream media. In 2006, The New York Times wrote a story on Nebraska’s decision to address school failures in Omaha by dividing the city into “three racially identifiable” school districts. Each district was racially heterogeneous, but one was predominantly black, one predominantly Latino, and one predominantly white. What made the story unusual was that the plan’s author was Ernie Chambers, the only African American in Nebraska’s legislature and a long-time civil rights advocate. Care to venture a guess as to The New York Times headline? “Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska.” The Times condemned majority-minority school districts as segregated simply because of their racial make-up. And if Omaha is segregating its schools, who wants to be on the wrong side of that fight? School quality matters, of course. But the shorthand the Times was using wasn’t about school quality; it was about which group dominates the student body and the school committee. And we forget that it is perfectly plausible to centralize some things and not others; if you are worried about economic inequality, you can run your schools at the local level without funding them there. That’s precisely what Ernie Chambers wanted to do; he thought the new arrangement would ensure that school quality would not suffer. Or consider the Supreme Court’s equality jurisprudence. The Court has condemned majority-minority electoral districts as “political apartheid.” A conservative majority also held in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989) that a minority set-aside program is more constitutionally suspect because it was enacted by a black-majority city council. Nor is it only the color-blindness camp that views minority-dominated institutions with skepticism. The same majority-minority electoral districts damned by the Court’s conservatives as “balkaniz[ing]” were termed “the politics of the second best” by its liberals. Consistent with the view of many progressives, the liberal justices treat the creation of such districts as a mildly distasteful strategy for ensuring a diverse legislature. Indeed, in the most recent schools case, every Supreme Court opinion—those penned by liberals and conservatives alike—condemned heterogeneous schools where minorities dominated as “segregated.” Critical distinctions get lost when we treat these issues as debates about segregation versus integration. The most obvious is that these institutions may be different from the racial enclaves of Jim Crow. The less obvious is that, viewed through the lens of federalism, we might imagine these sites as opportunities for empowering racial minorities rather than oppressing them. It’s hard to see the case for majority-minority institutions because the diversity paradigm offers such a deeply intuitive vision of fairness. We laud diversity on the grounds that racial minorities bring a distinctive view or experience to democratic decision-making. Those who favor it wax eloquent about the dignity associated with voice and participation. Given its many virtues, one might wonder why anyone would quarrel with the notion that democratic bodies should look like America. But the oddity of this theory for “empowering” racial minorities is that it relentlessly reproduces the same inequalities in governance that racial minorities experience everywhere else. Diversity guarantees that racial minorities are always in the minority for every decision where people divide along racial lines. Federalism and localism, in contrast, depend on—even glory in—the idea of minority rule. Neither theory requires you to like every policy passed at the local or state level any more than a nationalist has to agree with everything that Congress passes. But our current system rests on the assumption that decentralization can produce a healthier democracy in the long term. Ours is a world in which decision-making bodies of every sort (school committees, juries, city councils) are dominated by groups of every sort (Italians and Irish, Catholics and Jews, Greens and libertarians). We don’t worry about this representational kaleidoscope—let alone condemn it as “segregated”—merely because one group or another is taking its turn standing in for the whole. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry when it is a racial minority group in that position. Minority rule can promote both the economic and political integration of racial minorities. We have long understood minority rights as furthering those goals, which is why we care so much about them. But minority rule can further these goals as well. Often when we talk about democratic equality, we focus on its symbolic benefits rather than its material ones. We talk about the dignity of political participation but wrinkle our noses at the idea of political patronage. But history suggests a more muscular account of what a democracy can do for minorities. Politics can play an important role in promoting economic integration, and economics can play an important role in promoting political integration. Pam Karlan and New York University Law Professor Sam Issacharoff, for example, have argued that the economic progress of African Americans has turned not on the vindication of civil rights, but on business set-asides, affirmative action, and government employment. In their view, these programs came about precisely because blacks were able to elect their candidates of choice in majority-minority districts. “[T]he creation of a black middle class,” they write, “has depended on the vigilance of a black political class.” A group of economists at George Mason University found that black employment rates, for instance, rise during the tenure of black mayors, an effect that is particularly pronounced for municipal jobs. One might even argue that this was the story of integration for white ethnics, as Justice David Souter once argued. In Souter’s view, the Lithuanian and Polish wards of Chicago and the Irish and Italian political machines in Boston helped empower these groups. That power, in turn, “cooled” ethnicity’s “talismanic force.” In these examples, political power didn’t just facilitate economic integration. The economic advantages associated with political power exerted a gravitational pull on outsiders, bringing them into the system and giving them a stake in its success. Admittedly, this argument involves a more rough-and-tumble account of democracy than we read in our civics textbooks. And it certainly offers a less pristine view of integration than the one we associate with the rights model. But while we have long recognized the dignity conferred by the rights afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment or civil-rights statutes, we should also acknowledge the dignity involved in groups’ protecting themselves rather than looking to the courts for help. Indeed, this notion resonates entirely with the lesson of the civil rights movement. Rights were not “conferred” upon African Americans. They fought for them, pushing reluctant national leaders to do the right thing. Those who favor racial integration might also value minority rule for reasons that have nothing to do with its material benefits. We have long believed that political participation matters for equality. But we typically think of participation in highly idealistic and individualistic terms while ignoring crass concerns like who wins and who loses. Academics thus praise diverse democratic bodies because they involve the “politics of recognition”; they grant racial minorities the “dignity” of voice, ensuring that they play a role in any decision-making process. However, when one turns to the question of winners and losers, the limits of the diversity paradigm are clear. While the diversity paradigm guarantees racial minorities a vote or voice on every decision-making body, it also ensures that they will be the political losers on any issue on which people divide along racial lines. Racial minorities are thus destined to be the junior partner or dissenting gadfly in the democratic process. So much for dignity. Minority rule, in sharp contrast, turns the tables. It allows the usual winners to lose and the usual losers to win. It gives racial minorities the chance to shed the role of influencer or gadfly and stand in the shoes of the majority. Local institutions offer racial minorities the chance to enjoy the same sense of efficacy—and deal with the same types of problems—as the usual members of the majority. Minorities get a chance to forge consensus and to fend off dissenters. They get a chance to get something done and to experience the need for compromise, as dissenting from the margins normally comes with the luxury of ideological purity. And as with members of the majority, racial minorities don’t just have a chance to represent their own group—they have a chance to take their turn to stand in for the whole, which Princeton Professor George Kateb describes as a key feature of representative democracy. If the “politics of recognition” theorists are correct that the diversity paradigm—granting racial minorities a voice on every decision-making body—represents an acknowledgment of equal status, then federalism and localism acknowledge the ability of racial minorities not just to participate, but to rule. In place of what some call the “politics of presence,” we have the politics of power. In place of the dignity of voice, we have the dignity of decisions. The effects of turning the tables are not, of course, confined to racial minorities. It also deprives whites of the comfort and power associated with their majority status. The notion of turning the tables thus taps into a deeply intuitive idea of democratic fairness. Democracy works better when the usual losers sometimes win and the usual winners sometimes lose. Everyone ought to experience, in the words of President Bush, a good “thumpin’.” We have long thought that minority rights further economic and political integration. We have long associated minority rights with material advancement and expressive dignity for people of color. But we have ignored the possibility that minority rule might promote a similar set of aims, and thus offer another tool for helping us transition from a world of racial oppression to one of genuine equality. Dissenting by Deciding Progressives, of course, care a good deal about nurturing and protecting dissent. Perhaps it reflects their sympathy for the underdog. Perhaps it’s because progressives often are the underdogs. But dissent matters to progressives even when they think they can build a majority for their positions. That’s because it’s hard for progressive issues to get traction these days. It’s harder still to get something—anything—done in Washington. Dissent helps create the deliberative churn necessary for an ossified political system to move forward. The problem is that progressive views on dissent exhibit the same shortcomings as our discourse on race. The statistical integration model dominates here as well, albeit in a less explicit form. Consistent with the diversity paradigm, we typically assume that dissenters should be represented in rough proportion to their share of the population—one lone skeptic among twelve angry men. While we romanticize the solitary dissenter, we have no celebratory term for what happens when local dissenters join together to put their policies into place. Instead, we condemn governing bodies dominated by dissenters as “lawless” or “parochial,” as Fordham Law School Professor Nestor Davidson and University of Virginia Law Professor Richard Schragger have both found in their studies of the discourse surrounding local power. Here again, critical distinctions get lost when we focus on minority rights and neglect minority rule in thinking about dissent. We miss the possibility that governance can be a vehicle for dissent. For example, we typically don’t use the word “dissent” to describe San Francisco’s decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses or the efforts of the Texas school board to rewrite its history curriculum. Yet the people involved in these decisions subscribe to the same commitments as those whom we would in other contexts unthinkingly term “dissenters.” They simply dissented not through a blog or a protest or an editorial, but by offering a real-life instantiation of their views. They were dissenting by deciding. And yet the very idea of a dissenter who decides seems like a contradiction in terms. Even though our highly decentralized system offers numerous examples of dissenters wielding local power, our basic understanding of dissent is built around the assumption that dissenters don’t have the votes to win. We expect dissenters to speak truth to power, not with it. Just as it is odd that we affix the dreaded label “segregation” to institutions where racial minorities dominate, so too it is strange that we condemn decisions as parochial simply because political outliers make them. Just as the right to free speech has played an important role in shaping national debates, so too has minority rule. Consider the way the debate over same-sex marriage has unfolded during the last decade. Supporters of same-sex marriage spent many years exercising their First Amendment rights. They wrote editorials, marched in parades, and argued with their neighbors. That work played a crucial role in fueling a national debate on the question. But so, too, did the decisions of San Francisco and Massachusetts to issue same-sex marriage licenses to gay couples. Note, for instance, how different these instances of minority rule looked from the bread-and-butter activities of other proponents of same-sex marriage. The people who put these policies in place made the case for same-sex marriage in a way that abstract debate never could achieve. Beamed into our living rooms were pictures of happy families that looked utterly conventional save for the presence of two tuxedos or two wedding dresses. By taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by minority rule rather than relying on minority rights, proponents of same-sex marriage remapped the politics of the possible. If one is debating something in the abstract after all, the hardest argument to defeat is the parade of horribles. How exactly will you prove they won’t occur? Think, for instance, of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s claim that there would be rioting in the streets in response to San Francisco’s decision. It’s easy to dismiss this allegation in hindsight, but I must confess that when I was in Cambridge on the day that Massachusetts began marrying same-sex couples, I assumed that thousands of protestors would be bussed into the city. Instead, we saw a peaceful if slightly carnival-like atmosphere, with the only source of excitement being the Gay Men’s Choir. The decisions issued in San Francisco and Massachusetts didn’t just put to rest a variety of dire arguments about what would happen if same-sex couples were allowed to marry. They helped reveal something about where same-sex marriage fell on people’s priority lists. To be sure, when asked, “yes or no to same-sex marriage?” most people continued to say no. But same-sex marriage was not enough to motivate protesters to flock to California or Massachusetts, and that is something we could not possibly have learned from an abstract debate or opinion poll. Minority rule also lets dissenters engage in what political scientists term “agenda setting.” It’s one of the most powerful—and volatile—tools any minority enjoys. That’s because when a minority dissents by deciding, the majority can’t just ignore the dissenters, as majorities are wont to do. That option is simply unavailable when dissenters use local power to issue a decision. In that situation, the majority must do something to get the policy overturned. Minority rule shifts the burden of inertia and thus enables dissenters to force the majority to engage. Why does this matter? Our national system is notoriously sclerotic. There are issues that matter quite a lot to people on the ground but never make it onto the national agenda because elites have no interest in debating them. Some issues are highly salient to everyday people, which is precisely why those in power don’t want to go anywhere near them. Gay rights is one of those issues. Immigration is another. Note, for instance, that both sides of the debate on immigration have struggled to get the federal government to act on this question. But Arizona’s recently enacted immigration law has galvanized national debate and forced elites to engage. It is important here to note that even when states and localities pass policies that progressives dislike, getting the issue on the national agenda is what’s of value. With the issue on the national agenda, progressives, of course, still need to win the fight in Washington, as I discuss below. But that’s just as true of the nationalist model that progressives favor. The lesson that progressives often miss is the way that these two models interact. Local decisions can serve as a much-needed catalyst for national debates. Local politics don’t undermine national politics; they fuel it. There are others ways in which minority rule can serve the same ends as minority rights. As in the context of race, we often laud minority rights because they can knit political outliers into the polity. But the odd thing about a rights strategy for protecting dissent is that it pushes dissenters outside of the project of governance. They have a right to speak their mind, but only when they speak for themselves. Minority rule, by contrast, pulls dissenters into the project of governance. When dissenters wield local power, they can no longer jeer from the sideline. Instead, they have to suit up and get in the game. Minority rule thus requires dissenters to do just what the majority is accustomed to doing: deal with criticism, engage in compromise, figure out how to translate broad principles into workable policies. Abstraction and ideological purity are the luxuries enjoyed by policy-making outsiders. When dissenters have an opportunity to govern, however, they must figure out how to pour their arguments into a narrow policy space. Think about the movement to bring religion into schools. As members of the Christian right have fought to put their preferred policies into place, their positions have shifted. They have moved from teaching the creation story to merely “teaching the controversy.” Minority rights, then, are not the only means available for protecting political outliers and integrating them into the polity. Minority rule can serve precisely the same ends. It would be useful for progressives to recognize that fostering dissent involves not just the First Amendment, but federalism; not just minority rights, but minority rule. Racism, Parochialism, and the Costs of Local Power One might accept all of these arguments and yet still worry about local power because of the twin problems of racism and parochialism. Local power doesn’t just empower racial minorities and dissenters, a progressive might argue. It empowers those who will oppress them. The costs seem too great. It would be silly to argue that minority rule is without costs. But the model currently favored by progressives—a strong nationalist system—has costs as well, as the discussion above makes clear. Eliminating opportunities for local governance to protect racial minorities and dissenters also means eliminating the very sites where they are empowered to rule. More importantly, what we have today is not your father’s federalism. The federalism that haunts our history looks quite different from the form of local power that prevails now. Federalism of old involved states’ rights, a trump card to protect instances of local oppression. Today’s federalism involves a muscular national government that makes policy in virtually every area that was once relegated to state and local governments. The states’ rights trump card has all but disappeared, which means that the national government can protect racial minorities and dissenters when it needs to while allowing local forms of power to flourish. It would be foolish to insist that every state and local policy must be progressive for progressives to favor federalism. Decentralization will produce policies that progressives adore, and it will produce policies that they loathe. The same, of course, is true of a national system. Progressives have to make their case to the American people, just like everyone else. The point here is that progressives can fight for their causes in our current system, and they can win. Gone are the days of policy-making enclaves shielded from national power. If progressives are simply looking for guaranteed wins, it’s not decentralization that they should worry about—it’s democracy. Moreover, progressives tend to overstate the problem of parochialism. When progressives talk about democracy, they celebrate the idiosyncratic dissenter, the nobility of resistance, the glory of getting things wrong, and the wild patchwork of views that make up the polity. When progressives turn to governance, however, they crave administrative efficiency, worry about local incompetence, and have a strong impulse to quash local rebellion. We join de Tocqueville in celebrating the eccentric charms of local democracy, but our tastes in bureaucracy run with Weber: impersonal, rationalized, and hierarchical. It should come as no surprise that de Tocqueville’s democracy fails to produce Weber’s bureaucracy. But rather than spending all of our time worrying about that failure, maybe we should acknowledge the fact that decentralization offers so many benefits that progressive nationalists can value. Progressive nationalists have long worried that decentralized power needlessly fractures the national, exercising a centrifugal force on the polity. But ours is a system where local power can turn outsiders into insiders, integrating them into a political system and enabling them to protect themselves. It is one where the energy of outliers can serve as a catalyst for the center, allowing them to tee up issues for national debate. It is, in short, a form of federalism that progressive nationalists can celebrate. Progressives were right to worry about federalism in the past. They are wrong to worry about it now. Minority rule and minority rights are tools for achieving the same ends. Both can help further equality and nurture dissent. Progressives have long endorsed the nationalist case for national power. Now is the time to acknowledge the nationalist case for local power. The odd thing about the progressive case for local power is that it is utterly familiar to those on the ground. The virtues of decentralization may not play an important role in progressive thought, but these lessons haven’t eluded those involved in progressive politics. Progressives have long leveraged local population concentrations into political power. Indeed, much of the most important work on progressive issues started at the local level. Take climate change: From green building codes to cap-and-trade, the bulk of the work on the issue is being accomplished outside of Washington. And even national standards on fuel efficiency and the like have emerged largely as a result of states like California using their policy-making power to prod national regulators to move forward. It’s time that progressive thought caught up with these realities. Even those key areas where progressives have long looked to national power—promoting equality and protecting dissent—reveal that minority rule, and not just minority rights, should be understood as a key part of any healthy democracy.
“Controversy in the Psychology Classroom: Using Hot Topics to Foster Critical Thinking” Edited by Dana S. Dunn, Regan A. R. Gurung, Karen Z. Naufel, and Janie H. Wilson American Psychological Association Washington, D.C., 2013 Guide offers teachers advice about ‘hot’ topics Reviewed by James K. Luiselli, Ed.D., ABPP, BCBA-D The discipline of psychology certainly generates its share of controversy. In this book, the editors contend that “Some psychology teachers shy away from covering controversial topics out of fear of classroom disruption, student discomfort and the worry of eliciting shocked responses or, worse still, profoundly awkward silences.” At the same time, deep discussion of complex and nonconventional issues produces a vibrant learning environment and fulfills the best tenets of scholarly pursuit. Accordingly, the book is intended to arm faculty with effective strategies and methods for addressing various controversies and advancing psychological literacy. The audience for the book includes college-level professors, department chairs and program administrators but additionally, teachers of psychology at the high school level. In section I, the chapters consider several “guiding frameworks” when talking about several controversial topics such as race, culture, sexual orientation, mental illness and psychological experimentation to name a few. Readers will also find many practical solutions for establishing acceptable classroom protocol, selecting course materials, explaining grading policies and mentoring students beyond the classroom. Section II of the book is comprised of four chapters, each one focusing on a specific “hot topic.” The chapter about evolutionary psychology gets at fundamental views of human nature and development, the interplay between biology and learning and a host of “hardcore” beliefs that most students cling to until convinced otherwise. Other chapters discuss wide ranging opinions on spanking children, gender, faith-based beliefs and conducting animal research. The topics notwithstanding, most of these chapter authors conclude similarly about the tactics teachers should employ when engaging students in highly charged discourse and debate. In Section III, the chapters continue with and expand upon particular areas of controversy, namely teaching about evil and immorality, social justice, religion and disabilities. Like most of the book, the instructional tools contained in these chapters deal broadly with how to outline classroom content, direct verbal exchanges, arrange discussion groups, react to provocative questions from students and the like. The final chapter in this section summarizes concisely “how instructors can use controversial topics to stimulate student interest in course content as well as teach students to appreciate empirical evidence and apply scientific thinking when studying human behavior.” The editors have compiled a valuable resource for teaching critical analytic and expository skills to psychology students by embracing and not avoiding areas of controversy. In doing so, they develop intriguing ideas about pedagogy which, at first, may seem uncommon but are supported empirically. For psychology faculty, whatever the academic setting, the book should be an asset for promoting insightful student-to-student and student-to-teacher dialogue from a dialectical perspective. Above all else, it guides teachers to adopt responsible and respectful practices when exploring and resolving some of the most challenging topics within psychology education and training. n James K. Luiselli, Ed.D., ABPP, BCBA-D, is senior vice president, applied research, clinical training and peer review at the May Institute in Norwood, Mass. By James K Luiselli EdD ABPP BCBA-D
Who doesn’t like to see ice figures? Almost no one. Even better if it is nature itself that creates these characters in a bizarre way. This happens to the “ice hair” of the forests of Ireland. A phenomenon that surprises winter hikers in these places that are usually photographed by their side. Fragile like flowers In Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, ice that looks like cotton candy has formed between branches. Hundreds of icy strands can be seen up close. Yes, as if it were delicate white hair. They melt when touched or with the heat of the sun. This strange phenomenon is known as capillary ice or frozen flowers. These crystals form on rotten wood on damp winter nights. It happens when the temperature is just below 0 ° C. Scientists have discovered that the phenomenon is caused by a fungus called Exidiopsis router. This allows the ice to form fine hairs with a diameter of approx. 0.01 mm. The causative fungus Researchers at the University of Bern published a study on this in 2015. He says that capillary ice holds its shape due to a “recrystallization inhibitor” produced by the fungus. This inhibitor prevents small crystals from becoming larger crystals. This video from the European Union of Geosciences shows in slow motion how capillary ice forms: The “ice hair” of the Irish forests is not unique to this place. It grows mainly in latitudes between 45 and 55 degrees north. It can be seen in countries like Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, the United States, and many others. But in each of them the passer-by is always fascinated.
Water is of great importance to the human body. It is indispensable in metabolic processes. This is due to the fact that it is the environment of the reaction of all changes that take place in the human body. It is also the element that removes the end products of metabolism. It is worth noting that it accounts for about 70% of an adult’s body weight. It is also important that it is 90% a component of the blood and 75% of the muscles, as well as the fact that water promotes weight loss. What is the importance of water for the human body? Water removes dangerous toxins as well as other metabolic side effects. It also contributes to a much better digestion of food . What’s more, it regulates body temperature and, moreover, promotes joint hydration. It is of particular importance in the slimming process. It speeds up metabolic processes. Water not only cleanses the human system, helps burn calories, but also replenishes the fluids that a person loses through sweat. People who do not care about providing the right amount of water have dry skin, suffer from constipation, weakness or joint pain. Water is needed to carry out many biochemical changes that will burn food. Water promotes weight loss – how much water should you drink during the day to achieve the desired results? For adequate hydration of the body, drink 2 liters of non-carbonated mineral water a day. It is about 10 glasses. Overweight people who live in hot climates and exercise actively need more of this ingredient. Providing fluids during weight loss helps to accelerate weight loss. It effectively cleanses the intestines and the blood of toxins. What are the main benefits of drinking water? Water is the basic ingredient for life. You have to remember that a person will survive without food for about a month. However, without water, he will die after seven days. Moreover, a lot of fluid is lost when losing weight. The human system without this component will not carry out any internal processes. Eating a limited amount of food is a difficult time for the body. Then he is forced to get rid of all supplies. This leads to the lack of necessary compounds and substances. In response to this, weakness, irritability and bouts of bad mood appear. Radical fasting is never a good solution. The best results are ensured by a rationally developed and prepared diet, which is supplemented with physical activity and the right dose of water. A person who is on a diet not only loses kilograms, but also dangerous substances that pass through the kidneys and are excreted in the urine. With this in mind, you need to ensure that the correct amount of water is supplied. Moreover, cleansing the human system with water is healthy as it does not disturb electrolyte homeostasis. What functions of water help you achieve your dream figure? When discussing the importance of water in slimming, it is necessary to mention its functions, which are important in the process of fighting excessIt is important that the water is low in calories and helps to reduce appetite. Excess and shortage of water in the body Both the deficiency and the excess of water have an adverse effect on the body. Too little fluid hinders heat dissipation, reduces exercise capacity, overloads the liver, hinders digestion, or causes electrolyte disturbances. On the other hand, the excess loads the kidneys and also disturbs the work of the heart. Drinking water has a great impact on the success of your weight loss action. However, this is obviously not the only factor. You need a proper diet and exercise. Consuming water in accordance with the recommended standards significantly facilitates fat loss, for example by influencing metabolic processes. Thanks to it, the system copes better with physical effort.
October 16 is World Food Day. It can be a day of action, dedicated to tackling hunger and ensuring food security and nutrient-dense diets for everyone. Food should nourish and nurture people, society, and the planet, but in so many ways, the food system is broken. “Not only have habits changed, but also foods. When was the last time you consumed a potato with the flavor, color, and smell of potatoes? We are not just losing food, we are losing food quality,” says agricultural engineer Dr. Walter Pengue. Across the world, decreasing soil quality is stripping food of its nutrients: 33 percent of the Earth’s land surface is moderately to highly affected by some type of soil degradation. Food has also become the main driver of human health costs—while almost one-third of all people are undernourished and 815 million people still go to bed hungry, close to 30 percent of all people are overweight or obese and close to 10 percent of all people are actually obese. And throughout the food system, businesses, farms, and consumers are losing perfectly edible food—approximately one-third of all food produced is thrown away. If food waste were a country, it would rank as the third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. How do we start on the path towards a more sustainable food system? The answer is in the connections between all these systems. “The current economic systems do not include or reward the value of social, human, and natural capital in agriculture and food systems. This often leads to the promotion of practices that are harmful to farming, the environment, and people,” says agricultural scientist Dr. Harpinder Sandhu, who helped develop and write a recent report by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture & Food, or TEEBAgriFood. TEEBAgriFood’s new report presents a holistic new framework, which looks at the full range of impacts of the food value chain from a systems perspective—from farm to fork to disposal. This evaluation framework can support policymakers, researchers, and businesses in making better-informed decisions—decisions that will improve public health, regenerate soils, and nurture people and the planet. TEEBAgriFood recently won the World Future Council’s 2018 Future Policy Award in Vision for this comprehensive framework. “The only measure of success in current agriculture systems is higher productivity. But such a narrow focus on productivity has left our freshwaters more polluted as there are increases in surface run-offs from farms, loss of biodiversity, degradation of soil, and greenhouse gas emissions,” Dr. Harpinder continues. “This focus also leads to poor health for the farm workers, and consumers as well.” The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is applying the framework to two different corn systems in the Mississippi Valley—one organic and one conventional—to detect the positive and negative environmental, biodiversity, and climate impacts of both those systems. How can TEEBAgriFood’s holistic framework support your work towards a more sustainable food system for all? Share your thoughts, questions, and feedback in the comments.
What is in this article?: - How many acres of soybeans needed in 2014? - Planted acres and harvested acres vary - The large increase in soybean planting intentions for 2014 reflects strong world demand for soybeans and the resulting high prices of soybeans relative to other crops, particularly corn. The USDA's survey of U.S. crop producers last month revealed intentions to plant 81.493 million acres of soybeans this year. That is 3.765 million more than reported as planted or intended to be planted in June of last year, 4.96 million more than actually planted in 2013, and 4.042 million more than the previous record acreage in 2009. The large increase in soybean planting intentions reflects strong world demand for soybeans and the resulting high prices of soybeans relative to other crops, particularly corn. As the planting season gets underway, the job of the markets is to direct final planting decisions of major spring-planted crops. That is a complicated process surrounded by a lot of uncertainty about the nature of the growing season and resulting yields, as well as uncertainty about the strength of demand for U.S. crops during the year ahead. That demand strength, in turn, depends on the magnitude of production in the rest of the world and a number of economic and political developments. There are differing and changing assessments of all of these factors. The market, however, must direct planting decisions without knowing the outcome of these important factors. Ideally, production would be at levels that provide "reasonable" prices for both producers and consumers of the crops and some level of reserves at the end of the year. The USDA projects consumption of U.S soybeans and soybeans imported in to the U.S. during the current marketing year at 3.36 billion bushels, equal to the record consumption during the 2009-10 marketing year. Consumption is large in spite of continued high prices and back-to-back record production of soybeans in the rest of the world during the 2012-13 and 2013-14 marketing years. World consumption of soybeans during the current marketing year is projected at a record 9.884 billion bushels, 40 percent more than consumed 10 years ago. Much of the growth in world consumption has occurred in China, up 130 percent in 10 years. While it may not be reasonable to expect Chinese consumption to continue to grow at the pace of the past 10 years, there is no sign of a reversal in consumption. The U.S. should continue to have a large share of exports to China even with another large South American crop in 2015. Record high livestock prices and a likely increase in biodiesel production should keep domestic soybean consumption large as well. Under the assumptions of "reasonable" prices, large South American production, and slower but continued growth in word soybean consumption during the year ahead, consumption of U.S. and imported soybeans should be at least as large as during the current marketing year.
1a : having a gradual and cumulative effect : subtle the insidious pressures of modern life. b of a disease : developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent. 2a : awaiting a chance to entrap : treacherous. b : harmful but enticing : seductive insidious drugs. How do you pronounce conjuring? What is the pronunciation of magnanimous? Here are 4 tips that should help you perfect your pronunciation of ‘magnanimous‘: Break ‘magnanimous‘ down into sounds: [MAG] + [NAN] + [I] + [MUHS] – say it out loud and exaggerate the sounds until you can consistently produce them. What is Magnanimus? adjective. generous in forgiving an insult or injury; free from petty resentfulness or vindictiveness: to be magnanimous toward one’s enemies. high-minded; noble: a just and magnanimous ruler. proceeding from or revealing generosity or nobility of mind, character, etc.: a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness. Is Magnanimous a compliment? Magnanimous describes people who are generous in overlooking injury or insult and being high-minded and unselfish: “Forgiving her friend for betraying her was a very magnanimous gesture.” Magnanimous also refers to people who are “good winners.” For example: “The coach taught his players to be magnanimous in their David Nilsen is the former editor of Fourth & Sycamore. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can find more of his writing on his website at davidnilsenwriter.com and follow him on Twitter as @NilsenDavid.
Portrait of Margaret Cavendish in the frontispiece to her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). The image is also used as frontispiece to some editions of The Blazing World — Source. It is the middle of the seventeenth century and a Bear-man is helping an empress attempt to examine a whale through a microscope. After this task is found to be impossible, a group of Worm-men explain how creatures can exist without blood and how cheese turns to maggots. In her turn, the empress scolds an assembly of Ape- and Lice-men for their pursuit of tedious and irrelevant knowledge, such as the true weight of air, and commands they instead get busy with “such Experiments as may be beneficial to the publick”. Armed with such knowledge of the natural world and equipped with the resources of her vast dominions, she then sends flocks of Bird-men and navies of Fish-men to a parallel planet to make war on and conquer her many enemies. Such are the links between life, learning, and power within The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, a piece of prose fiction published in 1666 by the “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse the Duchess of Newcastle”, better known as Margaret Lucas Cavendish. The narrative blends utopian fiction, imperialist travelogue, and natural history to tell the story of a “young Lady” who is kidnapped from her homeland but soon escapes to a new and mysterious land filled with human-animal hybrids. On arrival she is made empress and quickly establishes societies of natural philosophy, funds theater and the arts, and destroys her enemies with fire and fury.The plot is often convoluted, with descriptions of military invasion or discussions with fantastical chimeras interspaced with short lessons on lenses or lectures on the nature of solar eclipses. Yet there is much that can be learned from Cavendish’s Blazing World, including the way it sheds historical and literary light on conceptions of gender, natural philosophy, political theory, theology, and the life of the author herself in seventeenth-century Europe. For example, in the emphasis on the stability of a realm in which everyone —- from the lowest Flea-man to the highest Emperor —- knows and respects their place in the natural hierarchy, we can see echoed Cavendish’s Royalist sympathies. Histories of feminism have also mined Cavendish’s works, as they reveal the ways in which she saw her own position limited within a society shaped by both gender and class. However, less examined is the way that the narrative illuminates the history of seventeenth-century European imperialism, and how ideas about power, race, and conquest related to those of gender and knowledge.
Extreme Drought And Its Challenges To The US’s Clean Water Supply This summer we have seen and felt the impacts of one of the worst droughts in the last 50 years. As of late June, over 55% of the country was experiencing moderate to extreme drought. The map to the right illustrates the drought’s far-reaching impacts; and while the most extreme effects are being felt in middle of the country, regions typically associated with “wet weather” like the Great Lakes, Southeast and Northeast regions are also feeling the heat. While a drought of this magnitude is not entirely predictable, its consequences are. Farmers across the country are losing crops, businesses are losing revenue, communities are scrambling to address dwindling drinking water sources and neighbors battle over access to scarce supplies. The drought looks different across the country: - The Great Lakes region has experienced unusually high temperatures and drought conditions this summer. Traditionally a wet weather region, the Great Lakes, our largest source of freshwater, and related rivers and streams have seen increased water temperatures and lowered water levels which has had negative effects on both humans and fish. Warm water temperatures are breeding grounds for algal blooms, which are a human public health risk and can be detrimental for cold-water fish. - The Rocky Mountain West has also experienced a catastrophic drought. After record-breaking fires blazed across the region this spring, they are now experiencing a serious water supply shortage. The two main reservoirs along the Colorado River – Lake Powell and Mead – are only at 64 percent of their capacity and the prospect of continued drought threatens the area even more. - In the Corn Belt region, farmers have been hit hard as many watch their crops struggle due to lack of water. Both the Washington Post and New York Times highlighted the impacts of the Corn Belt drought including significantly lower yields which are predicted to push up crop prices, and has the potential to increase food prices as well. - In the Southeast’s contested Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint basin, the state of Georgia put a moratorium on agricultural withdrawal permits [PDF] in the lower Flint and Chattahoochee basins due to prolonged drought conditions and extremely low river flows. And while this year’s drought may be the worst in 50 years, indicators suggest that we will see more frequent and extreme droughts of this magnitude into the future. The U.S. Global Change Research Program [PDF] found that droughts – such as the one we are experiencing now- are likely to become more common and intense as precipitation patterns change and we can expect longer, warmer dry spells between rain events will dry out soils and intensify drought conditions. In 2011, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on managing extreme events and disasters [PDF], which predicted that here in the US we can expect to see the most noticeable changes in the number and intensity of extreme drought events. We all need clean water and the prospect of more frequent and extreme droughts across the US challenges us to find new ways to secure reliable clean water supplies for today and the future. While we can’t make it predictably and reliably rain, we are able to manage the water we do have in ways that make our communities and rivers more resilient in the face of extreme and frequent drought. Here are some proven, reliable and cost-effective strategies to increase community resilience in the face of drought: - Protecting and restoring the water cycle provides us with hidden reservoirs that sustain water supplies in times of low and no precipitation. Protecting watersheds, using green roofs and rain gardens in urban areas and natural floodplain management allow for water to soak back into the ground and into critical recharge and source water areas. - Reducing water demand and lowering the need to extract water will expand the period of time communities, businesses and farms can sustain themselves on existing supplies. Implementing water efficiency measures stretches supplies and turns water waste into water supply. This strategy will also leave more water in the river and aquifer for downstream communities as well as fish and wildlife. - Optimizing existing infrastructure and supplies by reusing and recycling water, fixing leaky pipes, adjusting the timing of withdrawals, upgrading and retrofitting irrigation systems, reallocating reservoir storage and re-operating existing dams can cost-effectively buffer against the effects of drought and establish more secure water supplies. - Developing consensus-based collaborative solutions to water issues. Drought often causes a great deal of conflict and rather than argue over who has what claim, it is critical to develop solutions, like the Yakima Integrated Water Management Plan, where all stakeholders come to the table to hammer out an agreement that all can live with. Let’s not look in the rear-view mirror while attempting to navigate the road ahead. Water in rivers and aquifers is finite, there are limits to how much water can be extracted and droughts bring those limits into sharp focus. Communities need to adopt these 21st century solutions to water supply and drought so they are more resilient as they face an uncertain water future.
Marcion of Sinope (ca. 110-160 C.E.) was a Christian theologian who was excommunicated by the early church at Rome as a heretic; Nevertheless, his teachings were influential during the second century, and a few centuries after, thus forming a counter-point to emerging orthodoxy. Marcion played a significant role in the development of textual Christianity by forcing the various churches to debate the nature of the biblical canon and to delineate its contents. His own canon included ten Pauline Epistles, and a modified Gospel of Luke. According to Marcion, Saint Paul was the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ. Marcion is sometimes referred to as a gnostic but this charge is incorrect since his teachings were quite different from Gnosticism. Marcion was deemed a heretic for his rejection of the whole Hebrew Bible and other Christian books that were eventually incorporated into the canonical New Testament. He declared that Christianity was distinct from, and in opposition to, Judaism. Moreover, he regarded the God of the Hebrew Bible as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, but was actually the source of evil. For these reasons his teachings were rejected by the mainstream chuches. Biographical information about Marcion stems mostly from writings of his detractors. Hippolytus says he was the son of the bishop of Sinope (modern Sinop, Turkey). Rhodon and Tertullian described him as a ship owner. They further state that he was excommunicated by his father for seducing a virgin. However, Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities suggest that his seduction of a virgin was a metaphor for his corruption of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church being the virgin. Marcion travelled to Rome about 142–143. He arrived in Rome circa 140, soon after Bar Kokhba's revolt. In the next few years, he developed his theological system and attracted a large following. He was a consecrated bishop and was probably an assistant or suffragan of his father at Sinope. When conflicts with the bishops of Rome arose, Marcion began to organize his followers into a separate community. He was excommunicated by the Church of Rome around 144 and had a large donation of 200,000 sesterces returned. Marcion used his personal wealth, (particularly a donation returned to him by the Church of Rome after he was excommunicated), to fund an ecclesiastical organization that he founded. After his excommunication, he returned to Asia Minor where he continued to spread his message. He created a strong ecclesiastical organization resembling the Church of Rome, and put himself as bishop. Marcionism is the belief system that originated from the teachings of Marcion around the year 144. Marcion affirmed Jesus Christ as the savior sent by God and Paul as his chief apostle. He declared that Christianity was distinct from, and in opposition to, Judaism. He rejected the entire Hebrew Bible, and declared that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice (i.e. "An eye for an eye"). The premise of Marcionism is that many of the teachings of Christ are incompatible with the actions of Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. Tertullian claimed Marcion was the first to separate the New Testament from the Old Testament. Focusing on the Pauline traditions of the Gospel, Marcion felt that all other conceptions of the Gospel were opposed to the truth. He regarded Paul's arguments of law and gospel, wrath and grace, works and faith, flesh and spirit, sin and righteousness and death and life as the essence of religious truth. He ascribed these aspects and characteristics as two principles: the righteous and wrathful God of the Old Testament, the creator of the world, and a second God of the Gospel who is purely love and mercy and who was revealed by Jesus. Marcion declared that Christianity was distinct from and in opposition to Judaism. He rejected the entire Hebrew Bible, and declared that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, but was (de facto) the source of evil. Marcion is said to have gathered scriptures from Jewish tradition, and juxtaposed these against the sayings and teachings of Jesus in a work entitled the Antithesis. Besides the Antithesis, the Testament of the Marcionites was also composed of a Gospel of Christ which was Marcion's version of Luke, and that the Marcionites attributed to Paul, that was different in a number of ways from the version that is now regarded as canonical. It seems to have lacked all prophecies of Christ's coming, as well as the Infancy account, the baptism, and the verses were more terse in general. It also included ten of the Pauline Epistles (but not the Pastoral Epistles or the Epistle to the Hebrews, and, according to the Muratonian canon, included a Marcionite Paul's Epistle to the Alexandrians and an Epistle to the Laodiceans) In bringing together these texts, Marcion redacted what is perhaps the first New Testament canon on record, which he called the Gospel and the Apostolikon, which reflects his belief the writings reflect the apostle Paul and Jesus. Marcionites hold maltheistic views of the god of the Hebrew Bible (known to some Gnostics as Yaltabaoth), that he was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created is defective, a place of suffering; the god who made such a world is a bungling or malicious demiurge. In Marcionite belief, Christ is not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by the Monad to reveal the truth about existence, and thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge. Marcion called God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown. Tertullian, along with Epiphanius of Salamis, also charged that Marcion set aside the gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, and used the Gospel of Luke alone. Tertullian cited Luke 6:43-45 ("a good tree does not produce bad fruit") and Luke 5:36-38 ("nobody tears a piece from a new garment to patch an old garment or puts new wine in old wineskins"), in theorizing that Marcion set about to recover the authentic teachings of Jesus. Irenaeus claimed, "[Marcion's] salvation will be the attainment only of those souls which had learned his doctrine; while the body, as having been taken from the earth, is incapable of sharing in salvation." Tertullian also attacked this view in De Carne Christi. Because of the rejection of the Old Testament which originates in the Jewish Bible, the Marcionites are believed by some Christians to be anti-Semitic. Indeed, the word Marcionism is sometimes used in modern times to refer to anti-Jewish tendencies in Christian churches, especially when such tendencies are thought to be surviving residues of ancient Marcionism. For example, on its web site, the Tawahedo Church of Ethiopia claims to be the only Christian church that is fully free of Marcionism. On the other hand, Marcion did not claim Christians to be the New Israel of Supersessionism, and did not try to use the Hebrew scriptures to support his views. Marcion himself does not appear to be anti-Semitic, rather he rejected Jewish scriptures as irrelevant. The Prologues to the Pauline Epistles (which are not a part of the text, but short introductory sentences as one might find in modern study Bibles Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved July 15, 2008.), found in several older Latin codices, are now widely believed to have been written by Marcion or one of his followers. Harnack notes Retrieved July 15, 2008.: "We have indeed long known that Marcionite readings found their way into the ecclesiastical text of the Pauline Epistles, but now for seven years we have known that Churches actually accepted the Marcionite prefaces to the Pauline Epistles! De Bruyne has made one of the finest discoveries of later days in proving that those prefaces, which we read first in Codex Fuldensis and then in numbers of later manuscripts, are Marcionite, and that the Churches had not noticed the cloven hoof…" Conversely, several early Latin codices contain Anti-Marcionite prologues to the Gospels. The church Marcion founded expanded throughout the known world during his lifetime, and was a serious rival to the Roman Catholic church. Its adherents were strong enough in their convictions to have the church retain its expansive power for more than a century. Marcionism survived Roman persecution, Christian controversy, and imperial disapproval for several centuries more. The Roman Polycarp called him "the first born of Satan." His numerous critics also included Ephraim of Syria, Dionysius of Corinth, Theophilus of Antioch, Philip of Gortyna, Hippolytus and Rhodo in Rome, Bardesanes at Edessa, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen. Some ideas of Marcion's reappeared with Manichaean developments among the Bulgarian Bogomils of the tenth century and their Cathar heirs of southern France in the 13th century, especially the view that the creator God of the Hebrew Scriptures is a Demiurge who is in opposition to Christ. In these schools, the material universe was seen as evil, and the Demiurge was viewed as the creator of this evil world, either out of ignorance or by evil design. Marcionism continued in the East for some centuries later, particularly outside the Byzantine Empire in areas which later would be dominated by Manichaeism. This is no accident: Mani is believed to have been a Mandaean, and Mandaeanism is related to Marcionism in several ways. The Marcionite organization itself is today extinct, although Mandaeanism is not. All links retrieved September 17, 2014. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. 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Color Blindness Test v126.96.36.199 The software is is simple in concept to find the achromatchart with worsteds for testing color blindness.Colour blindness is basically a malfunctioning of the retina of the eye, which is responsible for the conversion of light energy into electrical energy, which is thereafter transferred to the brain in the form of signals. The conversion is carried out by two types of photoreceptor cells within the retina: cones, and rods. Disturbances or disorders in colour perception will occur when the amount of pigment present per cone is reduced, or absent. Programs similar to Color Blindness Test \|Boatload of Crosswords\|\|September 08, 2014\| Test your brain solving thousands of crosswords and puzzles. \|File size: 5.4Mb\|\|License: Shareware\|\|Details\| \|Flip Words Free game download\|\|January 31, 2011\| Flip Words Game, is one of 300 Free Games - Download Flip Words Game \|File size: 0.68Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| \|DB Fahrplanauskunft\|\|July 02, 2011\| A great puzzle that is fun for the whole family. Can you solve it? Try your luck \|File size: 0.15Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| \|Blockdude\|\|January 28, 2010\| Blockdude is a remake of blockman, blockdude \|File size: 1.67Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| \|Zen Games\|\|September 03, 2007\| Enjoy the inspiring and peaceful atmosphere of Zen. \|File size: 40.97Mb\|\|License: Shareware\|\|Details\| \|Butterfly Kyodai\|\|June 22, 2011\| Butterfly Kyodai is an interesting puzzle game for free. \|File size: 1.16Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| \|Mouse Trap\|\|November 14, 2007\| The naughty little mouse has consumed all of your cheese. Outraged, you decided to catch the thief and gives it some delicious revenge. In this game, your target is to trap the mouse before it escapes. When the game starts, the mouse will stay at the center of a large mat composed of multiple hexagonal tiles and a number of pillars. Each time when you click any of the empty tiles to place a pillar, the mouse will move to an adjacent tile. Continu \|File size: 0.64Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| \|Passage 3 Christmas Edition\|\|March 11, 2009\| Play the free Christmas edition of Passage 3 and get into the holiday gaming spirit. \|File size: 3.9Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| Win the game by unscrambling the mixed-up words. \|File size: 4.76Mb\|\|License: Shareware\|\|Details\| \|MyPlayCity Puzzles\|\|April 11, 2007\| This logical game will definitely be enjoyed by players of all ages, since it has been specifically made to help you to have a relaxing break and spend a good time at a PC screen. \|File size: 1.99Mb\|\|License: Freeware\|\|Details\| Arcade, print, inner peace, players, fixes, mouse trap, playing, enhanced, word dictionary, printing, small, dominoes, puzzler, puzzles, precious, fun, error, conversion, gameplay, fiendish, popular
On a rainy afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, the illustrator Mick Ellison made his way through the crowds to a creature he had drawn—forty-five million years, give or take, after it last walked the earth. The beast was long and hairy, with four hoofed legs and what the display text described as “powerful crushing jaws.” Its name is Andrewsarchus mongoliensis, and somehow, the story goes, it was a forefather to what we now know as the whale. Before whales ever swam, their ancestors were large, land-dwelling animals that ate meat and, at least in the case of Andrewsarchus, lived in the Gobi Desert. The only clue to their existence is a skull on display in “Whales: Giants of the Deep,” an exhibition on view at the A.M.N.H. through January 5th. The fossilized skull, with its suggestion of a snout and teeth as big as a sumo wrestler’s thumbs, was found in 1923 on a dig in Mongolia and has been part of the museum’s collection ever since. “It’s an enigma in a lot of ways,” Ellison, forty-nine years old but boyish in jeans and an untucked brown corduroy shirt, said. “There’s never been another fossil of it found, and it doesn’t really fit in. It has confounded scientists for decades.” As one of the museum’s staff illustrators—he has held the job for more than two decades—Ellison was asked to make a drawing of what Andrewsarchus might have looked like in action. Though his muse in this instance was a mammal, his specialty in the department of paleontology is drawing dinosaurs. Favorites from his oeuvre include the bird-lizard Sinornithosaurus and the four-winged flying microraptor, which he illustrated once in series that imagined its evolution backward, from fossilization to flight. In the case of his hairy proto-whale, Ellison could only learn so much from a skull. “Honestly, I could have done seven or eight different versions and they all would have been hypothetical Andrewsarchuses,” he said. To begin the process of drawing, he communed with the skull, assessing its contours. Other drawings of Andrewsarchus have been proffered in the past, but for the sake of the museum that owns its sole known remnant he wanted to make a definitive statement. “The first thing I do is try to get all of those other images out of my head,” he said. “You’ve got to erase the board. It’s a process of unlearning.” Recent analyses by the museum had suggested a different lineage for the fossil, moving it away from a group called mesonychids (wolf-like animals that lived after dinosaurs) and classifying it instead in the category of hippos and proto-pig-like things called entelodonts. With that in mind, Ellison looked at the skull and looked some more. “If you stick to the practical roots of anatomy, bones give you so many clues,” he said. Hints came from the shape and size of its teeth, from the length of its snout, and especially from suggestive areas around the mouth. “It had a huge sagittal crest, and what that means is it had these powerful chewing muscles attached to the bone,” he said. “That implies that it had a deep, powerful set of jaws. Very few people have illustrated it that way.” This was far from Ellison’s first inductive challenge. He began working at the museum in 1990, after responding to an ad in a newspaper. (“Must be willing to go on expeditions,” he remembers it saying.) The application process was rigorous, Ellison said. “They put us all in a small room. One of the older artists pulled out a kangaroo vertebra, put it on the table, and said, ‘Whoever draws this best gets the job.’ It was terrible!” They toiled at their drawings for nine hours. Since then, Ellison has worked on the museum’s fifth floor, where much of the institution’s collection is stored on ramshackle shelves, away from public view. (Only one per cent of the thirty-two million specimens that belong to the museum are displayed at any given time.) His desk is surrounded by weird curios: taxidermied birds, a fetal alligator in a jar, bones of things contorted into sculptural arrangements. Nearby are scraps and props for models he makes for the sake of drawing dinosaurs. “I try to do a maquette in 3-D, light it, paint it, and then draw it,” Ellison said. “So much dinosaur art ends up looking like some sort of fantastical dragon, but it’s more rewarding when I see an illustration that looks like it was actually walking around.” For the drawing of the Andrewsarchus, Ellison adapted his process for dinosaur art and attached paper drawings of ears and clay-sculpted eyes and noses directly to the millennia-old skull. “I took steps to protect the fossil, of course,” he said. “It looked kind of cool. When you flesh it out, Andrewsarchus is a very odd-looking animal.” In the finished drawing, the precursor to whales looks calm and imposing, captured mid-stride with its mouth open wide, teeth ready to chomp. Next to it, to lend a sense of scale, is a drawing of Kan Chuen Pao, an assistant who found the fossil on an expedition led by Roy Chapman Andrews, who the Andrewsarchus is named after. Its label reads, “Like most mammals, Andrewsarchus had four legs for locomotion. In whales, the front legs evolved into flippers, and the hind legs all but disappeared.” Ellison still doesn’t know for certain how Andrewsarchus really appeared. If future findings reveal more facts about the creature, Ellison will simply draw it again. This happens often in his line of work. “It’s fun to see how you were wrong,” he said. (In fact, he already has: since finishing the illustration now on view in the museum, he went to work on a newer version, with minor adjustments, to show at a conference of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.) As it looks in the museum, his original vision of Andrewsarchus takes pride of place at the beginning an exhibit likely to summon more than a few wild imaginings. Asked if he thought it might be enjoying new time in the spotlight, Ellison, looking at the skull once more, said, “He is. I think he was lonely.” Andy Battaglia is a writer in New York. Drawings by Mick Ellison.
The male albatross is finally back from his foraging, and now there is no time to lose. His mate has been patiently sitting on their nest awaiting his return, without food, for nearly a month, and we have to get to her before she flies off to forage for herself. Our colleague, biologist Anna Nesterova, crawls slowly toward the bird. All of a sudden, she lunges: With her left hand she expertly grabs the 10-kilogram albatross by the beak, and with her right arm she hugs its body and lifts it off the nest and its precious cargo, a single egg. Together we then fix a GPS logger onto the feathers of the bird’s back with adhesive tape and glue. Soon after we release her, the mother albatross takes two or three steps into the furious wind, opens her 3-meter-wide wings, and takes flight. Four weeks from now, she’ll return to this island in the southern Indian Ocean bearing a data log of where and how she flew—data that at last will put to the test our theories of how she stays aloft so long, almost never touching down, barely even flapping her long, elegant wings. If we could get our aerial robots to emulate that feat, they might someday orbit Earth for months, surfers of the winds of the uttermost sky. Since at least the 1880s, scientists have wondered how the wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans), soars for as long and as far as it does, over open water, without a bit of thermal updraft. It’s no accident that the bird makes its home in exceptionally windy places—the wind is essential for such a heavy animal to get airborne in the first place. Once in the air, the bird performs a flying trick that seems to involve characteristic repetitive up and down maneuvers, sometimes dipping nearly to the water’s surface, and all in the face of more wind than most cruise passengers can withstand without going green with seasickness. This type of flight is known as dynamic soaring. Just watch an albatross, and you can easily discriminate its four phases of flight: There’s a windward climb, then a curve from windward to leeward at peak altitude, then a leeward descent, and finally a reverse turn close to the sea surface that leads seamlessly into the next cycle of flight. Although any human pilot who tried to use dynamic soaring to take passengers from Munich to New York City would lose his license 2 minutes after landing, a computer that’s controlling an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, isn’t quite so constrained. The engineers who program it need merely to understand this trick of nature and adapt it to their ends. And this is exactly what we are up to. Students of the albatross’s flight understood early on that the bottommost layer of wind blowing above any surface, including that of water, will incur friction and thus slow down. This layer itself then becomes an obstacle that slows the layer just above it (though not by much), in a process that continues upward. The result is a 10- to 20-meter-high region known as a boundary layer or shear wind field, through which the wind speed increases smoothly and dramatically the higher you go in the field. Dynamic soaring maneuvers extract energy from that field, enabling the albatross to fly in any direction, even against the wind, with hardly any effort. Exactly how the bird extracts energy from a horizontally blowing wind, however, was a puzzle. Scientists over the decades have attempted to find the solution using increasingly sophisticated computer simulations. Yet elaborate as they may be, these models can’t capture the full complexity of what’s happening. How do you simulate, for example, a sea troubled by strong winds that breaks up into irregular, meter-high waves, chopping the air into discontinuous blocks? Because of such unknowns, researchers long debated whether the shear wind field alone explained the soaring or whether there might also be other effects, such as gusts or vertical wind components. We finally resolved this controversy at the Institute of Flight System Dynamics, at the Technische Universität München (Munich University of Technology), using an optimization method known as periodic optimal control. This same methodology had previously proved effective in aeronautical engineering, to calculate the aircraft trajectory that saves the most fuel, for example. At the institute, we had also used it to optimize the flight trajectories of space gliders to deal with emergency cases. Under normal conditions, the vehicle would just glide home, adjusting its attitude with tiny thrusters and flaps and other aerodynamic control surfaces. But it also had to be able to survive failures of the control surfaces. So we looked at the interaction between the vehicle’s glide and Earth’s gravitational field and atmosphere, with an eye toward minimizing the thrusters’ consumption of propellant. We also had to factor in the time of failure, possible airfields for landing, and the physical limitations of the vehicle, such as maximum g-load factor and maximum heat flow. When we set out to apply optimization theory to the albatross, some groundwork had already been laid. The drag and lift characteristics of the bird, for example, had been analyzed back in the 1920s by Pierre Idrac of France; in the 1960s by Vance A. Tucker and G. Christian Parrott [PDF] of the United States and by M. Berger & Wolfgang Göhde of Germany; and in the 1980s by Colin J. Pennycuick [PDF] of the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the distribution of the wind speed above the sea surface had been well described in previous research. Combining these results, we worked out a set of differential equations that describe the dynamics of flight. We also expressed the wind profile close to the water’s surface as a function of the wind speed at higher altitudes. Together, the two elements of our model were able to simulate the flight of the bird based on the lift coefficient, the bank angle, and the wind speed. We then plugged our model into high-performance optimal control tools. We instructed our computer program to find the control inputs that would yield a trajectory an albatross could trace without flapping its wings under the following constraints: first, that the direction of flight and the total energy state—the sum of kinetic and potential energies—were the same at the beginning and the end of a flight cycle (as it must be in the endlessly repeating soaring cycle); and second, that the program search for the maneuver that worked at the lowest possible wind speed. The result we got was a minimum wind speed of 8.6 to 8.9 meters per second, at a reference altitude of 10 meters. Our boundary condition ensured that the predicted trajectory would be energy neutral, so that once started it would continue to repeat itself. Our model thus predicted that albatrosses could soar dynamically as long as the wind speed is a bit more than 30 kilometers per hour (16 knots). It is no coincidence, then, that these birds live in the far southern latitudes known as the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties, where typical wind speeds are much higher than that. What is more, our results indicated that the shear wind field alone could enable the flight of the birds. No effects from waves, turbulence, or anything else are required. Proving our calculations, however, required getting some real measurements. To prove the theory experimentally, we knew we would need to capture the albatross’s quick-changing flight vectors. The meter-level accuracy and once-per-second readings of the GPS receiver in your car aren’t fine grained enough for that job. We needed decimeter precision and an update rate of 10 hertz. We did find some geodetic units that deliver GPS readings to the centimeter level, but they came with constraints that no wandering albatross would stomach: hardware far too big and heavy to fly with, a range to the base station’s receiver far shorter than the bird naturally travels, and, in many cases, an initial calibration that would require the bird to stay completely still for up to 15 minutes. After some head scratching, we came up with a solution: We used miniaturized mass-market receivers that normally calculate positions to meter-level accuracy at 1 Hz. But instead of having the device calculate its position in real time, we rigged it to log GPS raw data at 10 Hz, so that we could process the information at our leisure, back in the office. We were able to do this because we didn’t care about the unit’s absolute accuracy, only its precision—that is, we wanted to know the shape of a particular soaring maneuver relative to its starting point, wherever that starting point might be. And so we didn’t need to initialize the system or keep it close to a base station. We came up with a novel, time-differential algorithm that exploits the same type of raw measurements used by most geodesy software: highly precise albeit ambiguous measurements of the phase of a GPS satellite’s carrier signal (or L1). Normally, a navigation system will rely mainly on tracking a coarse yet robust code modulated on a high-frequency carrier signal. That way the system can measure the absolute distance between the receiver and each satellite in view to within a meter. Our strategy of directly exploiting the fragile carrier signal let us measure merely the change in the range since signal acquisition, but to do so to within a centimeter. We could thus precisely distill dynamic soaring maneuvers out of the carrier-phase data without knowing exactly where the maneuvers started. In December 2008, two of us (Traugott and Nesterova) headed out to the field to put our ideas and our equipment to the test. We flew to Réunion, east of Madagascar; the French island constitutes one of the outermost parts of the eurozone. There we boarded the southbound French research vessel Marion Dufresne II. Two weeks later we reached the Kerguelen Islands, 2800 kilometers east of South Africa, getting off at the research station in Port-aux-Français. We then had an 8-hour eastward hike to our base camp, a simple hut without running water or electricity. Our expedition included several other researchers working with two French organizations: the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology, directed by Francesco Bonadonna of the University of Montpellier, and the French Polar Institute Paul Émile Victor. Nesterova, the biologist, had come mainly to study king penguins, not albatrosses. But it was well that she was there. As an aerospace engineer, Traugott had never handled a wild animal, much less one with a beak as long and sharp as a carving knife; he had never even seen a wandering albatross up close. One of our main tasks during the six weeks we spent in the field was to watch for the brief changings of the guard between breeding pairs. Only at such a hand-off could we capture and tag a bird we knew would fly out soon. We kept an eye on about 35 albatross nests scattered quite widely in the vicinity of our hut. We had permission from the French administration of the archipelago to fit up to 20 birds with loggers, and we didn’t want to miss a single opportunity. We equipped our first bird the week before Christmas. The procedure by which we mounted the GPS logger has been widely used by other researchers; it exposes the animals to a minimum stress level, and, just as important, it keeps the device in place. We taped the logger to second-layer feathers right below the shoulder joints and secured the tape with superglue. Three days later, our first bird returned. As Traugott approached the nest, his heart was pounding. But the GPS logger was gone! All that effort for a small piece of electronics that now lay at the bottom of the ocean. Head bowed, he returned to the hut to tell Nesterova. She frowned. “Let’s have a closer look,” she said. Back at the nest, our bird had already taken over for his mate, who had left to go find breakfast. Nesterova crawled to the nest, took the bird firmly but gently in hand, and then carefully examined it. The logger was still there! It had simply been covered up with plumage. We used a pair of scissors to cut the tape. Finally we had the bird’s precious payload in our hands. Back in the hut, we eagerly downloaded the data to a laptop. The in-depth processing would be done back in our Munich office, but we wanted to find out if we had managed to log any in-flight data, how good the data were, and whether we needed to tweak some system parameters to make the next logging trip more successful. Indeed, a first check revealed that the raw data on the carrier phase were not of the quality we’d hoped for, but still good enough to work with. It seems that the quality problem stemmed partly from the multiple paths taken by the reflections of the signal from the waves. Processing this data back in Munich was challenging. Back home, our analysis continued. As we described earlier, dynamic soaring involves a climb into the wind, a curve to leeward, a leeward descent, and a reverse turn close to the sea surface, where the cycle begins anew. Our measurements were the first to demonstrate that the total energy in these maneuvers is the same at the beginning and the end of the trajectory. We also found that the closer the bird got to the water’s surface, the lower the total energy; right near the water, there was no gain at all. Our work therefore proved that the waves and related turbulence play no significant role in the bird’s flight. We discovered that total energy tops out after the bird makes its upper turn, so this has to be the part of the cycle in which it extracts the most energy from the wind. On top of this energy analysis we looked at the aerodynamic forces acting on the bird, which were quite complex. The essence is as follows: The local shear wind lets the bird change the direction of the lift it generates as a kind of propulsive force during the upper curve of the cycle. At that moment, the strong wind acts like a kind of outboard engine. Afterward, the bird dives close to the water and then turns back up, in the process incurring a braking effect. The bird still has a “propulsion profit” over the whole cycle that just manages to overcome drag. As long as it keeps up that pattern of dips, swoops, and turns, it can keep on flying—flying for free. In short, the insights offered by our GPS measurements largely confirmed the findings of our optimization-based analysis. We now know a lot more about the fascinating flight of these beautiful animals than we did before. Of course, there is always room for refinement. For one thing, we weren’t able to measure the birds’ air speed directly because any appropriate sensor, such as a pitot tube, would stick out of the plumage quite a bit—probably enough to affect flight and surely enough to annoy the birds. Instead we had to rely on rather coarse remote wind information provided by satellite measurements (QuickSCAT ocean surface wind vectors). In the future, we’d also like to measure attitude—the angles of roll, pitch, and yaw. The rapid development of inertial sensors made with microelectromechanical systems should allow us to do that the next time around. This project is more than a sideline in natural history. The open sea isn’t the only place that offers a shear wind field suitable for dynamic soaring, and wandering albatrosses aren’t the only pilots that rely on it to conserve energy. Such boundary layers also exist within the high-altitude jet streams that encircle Earth; even though these layers are much thicker than the one the albatross flies in, the physics are the same. That means that UAVs with the proper aerodynamics and programming might one day exploit them to stay aloft for weeks or months on end, allowing them to serve as surveillance nodes or radio relay links. And indeed, flight optimizations we’ve done in related research show that aircraft having the aerodynamics of today’s gliders or sailplanes could perform sustained dynamic soaring in these atmospheric layers by accordingly scaled maneuvers. “Surfing the jet stream” is no mere fantasy; it is a reasonable strategy for aeronautical engineers to pursue. This article originally appeared in print as “The Flight of the Albatross.” About the Authors When Gottfried Sachs, a professor of flight mechanics and flight control at Technische Universität München, suggested that Johannes Traugott do his doctoral thesis on albatross flight, Traugott says he jumped at “the once-in-a-lifetime chance” to combine his interests in algorithms, flying, and sailing. Traugott now develops navigation tools for Trimble Navigation, of Sunnyvale, Calif. Anna Nesterova, a biologist at the Center for Functional Ecology and Evolution, in Montpellier, France, collaborated on the albatross study while researching the navigation of penguins; she is now a postdoc at the University of Oxford.
A key component of the global economy, Financial services encompasses a broad range of service sector firms that provide money management, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance providers, accountancy corporations and consumer finance companies. Financial services support investment, production, savings and other economic activities that promote the growth of a country, leading to economic prosperity for all. Banks are the foundation of financial services, holding customer deposits and lending funds to customers. They earn revenue through fees, commissions and methods like the spread of interest rates between loans and deposits. The consumer financial services market includes mortgage lenders, personal and student loan providers and credit card firms. It also includes payment services, which allow people to pay for goods and services with plastic in exchange for a percentage of the transaction total. Examples include debit cards and Amazon Pay. Technology has had a profound effect on the financial services industry, making it easier for employees to access data and make better decisions. It has also increased the efficiency of many processes and lowered costs. As with all industries, breaking into the financial services sector requires a strong network and a willingness to learn. Entry-level positions are usually focused on training and development with opportunities to gain hands-on experience within a team. One of the most significant recent developments in the financial services industry is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). While it has been used to streamline and automate tasks for decades, its applications are growing in scope. The financial sector is one of the most likely to benefit from recent advancements in AI, with benefits that extend to business operations, decision-making and customer experience.
Gottorf Castle and its gardens Gottorf Castle is located in Schleswig and was in the ownership of Danish monarchs for a while until King Christian III let his younger brother prince Adolph have the castle in 1544. This marked the beginning of the ducal house of Gottorf. From 1544 to 1713 the dukes of Gottorf lived at the castle, which became a centre for the arts and sciences thanks to the efforts made by Duke Frederick III. The Gardens at Gottorf Castle In 1637 Duke Frederick III began creating a new garden at Gottorf Castle. The result was a splendid garden in the Baroque style. The flowers in this new garden were portrayed by Hans Simon Holtzbecker in the Gottorfer Codex, a so-called florilegium. Rare plants from around the world The garden featured rare plants from remote corners of the world. Plants that were seldom seen in Northern Europe at the time were brought together here in hitherto unseen numbers. In the 17th century it was common practice for those who owned fine collections of plants to commission an artist to paint them. Spoils of war to Copenhagen The Great Northern War took place in 1700-21, and in 1713 Danish troops occupied the duchy of Gottorf. Over the course of the next 35 years the contents of the famous Kunstkammer at Gottorf Castle as well as its large library were shipped off to Copenhagen. That is how the Gottorfer Codex and The Green Florilegium both ended up at the SMK. The gardens and castle today Today the Baroque garden has been re-established at Gottorf. However, no-one knows for sure what the garden looked like in the mid-17th century. A number of the plants featured in the Gottorfer Codex are also part of the planting scheme in the new garden. However, accomplishing this was not entirely straightforward. Over the course of the centuries the plants have been cultivated and changed. Some, however, have quite amazingly survived unnoticed in the garden during its overgrown years. Visit the website of Gottorf Castle (external link) Back to Flowers and World Views - About the exhibition - Sponsors and foundations - What's on - The Drawing Studio - Watch the conservators at work - Ask a question - See the conservators’ replies - An old treasure is restored - Conservation: One on One - Six flower exhibitions - View the flowers - Explore views of the world - About Frederick III - Poetry album
Reading is an essential skill. Not only does it allow us to connect, gain knowledge, and learn but also to immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds. Research has highlighted the many benefits of reading on child development, with kids who read having a larger and more extensive vocabulary. Children who read gain a deeper understanding of their world, develop empathy, and improve their social skills. However, building a big collection of children’s books is not always possible. Space and storage constraints can limit the number of books available at home. Moreover, kids develop so quickly that it may seem wasteful to spend large sums of money on books that will only be relevant for a short period of time. Libraries are a treasure trove of reading resources, but access to a library may not always be possible. Ebooks as an alternative There is a multitude of ebook apps and devices that can be used to access reading resources. As a parent, you may have concerns about your child using a device such as a tablet for reading. You should weigh a number of factors when deciding what device to buy for your child. You might consider allowing them to use a regular tablet or a mobile phone to access books. One aspect to take into account when choosing a reading device is whether you want it to be used exclusively for reading or you’d also like it to offers other functionalities, as a tablet does. All about the Kindle If you’re concerned about distractions from other apps, games, online videos, and social media, you may want to consider a Kindle. Unlike tablets, this device is purpose-built for reading. The classic Kindle has a black and white glare-free screen and can store over 1,000 books. The screen has a gentle backlight that can be adjusted, so the device can be used in low light conditions. A single charge can last for up to 4 weeks depending on the light settings and wireless usage. There are a number of Kindle models designed specifically with kids in mind. Kindle Kids is recommended for children from the age of 7 and is ideal for both beginner and more experienced readers of chapter books. It’s also fitted with parental controls. By accessing the parent dashboard, you can adjust the age filters for content, add books to the library, and view your child’s reading progress. The Kindle Kids has a 2-year warranty to cover any defects. It’s available in a variety of cover colors and designs that close magnetically to ensure that the screen is protected. Kindle Kids has a few other handy features, including: - A built-in dictionary adds searched words to a “vocabulary builder” set of flashcards. - “Wise words” on many English titles provide short definitions of difficult words to help kids read with fewer interruptions. - It offers access to over 1,000 audiobooks on Audible, which will allow your kids to switch between reading and listening to their story. Looking for kid-friendly tablets? Designed with school kids in mind, the Fire 7 Kids Pro Tablet is great for children aged 6+. Measuring 7 inches in size, it’s the most compact of all the Fire tablets. All Fire Pro models come with a slim kid-friendly case complete with a built-in stand and a 2-year warranty. The browser is designed with safety in mind, featuring built-in controls to help filter out inappropriate content and block specific sites. If you’re serious about environmental issues, you’d be happy to know that the Fire Kids Pro tablet was made with sustainability in mind. A portion of the case and packaging are fashioned from recycled materials, and the device has improved energy efficiency. Amazon Second Chance also allows you to explore ways of trading in or recycling your tablet in the future. Parental controls let you set limits and goals, view usage and browser history, and enable the digital store, web browser, and call feature. Kids can send announcements and make voice and video calls over wi-fi to approved contacts. What to consider when choosing between a Fire tablet and a Kindle The Kindle Kids is only an e-reader, while the Fire Kids Pro is an entry-level Android tablet. Here are some differences and similarities to consider: - Screen: The screen of a Kindle is created to replicate the feel of a book as closely as possible. It’s non-reflective and anti-glare, similar to paper. It’s also monochromatic, so it doesn’t show colors. The Fire Kids Pro tablet has an LCD screen, so it’s full color, but just as in other devices, such as smartphones and laptops, it will be a reflective screen. - Appearance: As both of these devices are made with kids in mind, they are durable and able to withstand bumps and drops. They are designed to be sturdy rather than attractive. - Waterproofing: Tablets and Kindles have varying ratings when it comes to waterproofing, so if the device is likely to be used poolside or near the bath, you should check the specifications. - Camera: While the Fire tablets have both front and rear cameras, these are relatively low resolution compared to the average smartphone. Kindles don’t have cameras. - Battery life: Most Amazon devices are built with energy efficiency in mind. Depending on usage, the Fire Kids Pro can last for up to 7 hours between charges, while a Kindle Kids can last up to a month based on half an hour of reading per day. How do I access and purchase books for kids on Kindle? A subscription to Amazon Kids+ provides access to over 20,000 books for children, as well as kid-friendly movies, TV shows, games, and educational apps (on compatible devices). By using the parent dashboard, you’ll be able to customize your child’s experience and select the content most suitable for their age. With Amazon Kids+, you can create profiles for up to 4 children, and kids can’t access social media or make any in-app purchases without parental consent. A 1-year subscription to Amazon Kids+ is included with the purchase of a Kindle Kids for new subscribers, with the subscription renewing monthly at the applicable rate after the year is up. Books are added to the Amazon Kids+ library and can be searched for by title, author, or theme, for example, “new books” or “adventure.” By adjusting the age filter, you can control the selection of titles available to your child. You can also purchase the books directly from the Kindle Store and add them to your child’s profile via the parent dashboard. Amazon Kids lets you set daily limits on screen time while leaving unlimited time for reading. You can also control when Amazon Kids shuts down for the day by activating the Bedtime feature. Is the Kindle easy to use? Kindles are very user-friendly. When getting started for the first time, you follow the on-screen prompts to register the device and claim the Amazon Kids+ subscription. Create your child’s profile and set a parental control PIN. There is a power on/off button and an access port for a micro USB. You can select books using the parental controls to add titles to the library, or you can choose them together with your child. While Kindle is recommended for children aged 7+ for independent reading, you can easily use it for storytime for kids or for supervised or assisted reading practice for younger children. The Kindle Store on Amazon You can easily browse through the selection of Kindle books available on Amazon by going directly to the Kindle Store. Based on your browser history, the home page will select top picks for you, recommend books on Kindle Deals, tell you about new releases, and inform you of the current best sellers. Books on specific themes will also be displayed on this page. You can refine your search by using keywords or selecting specific criteria in the sidebar. Amazon First Reads offers early access to editor’s picks for the month at exclusive prices. Each month, you can choose 2 Kindle books for only $1.99 and shop for select print editions for $9.99 or less in participating months. The selection of kids’ books on Amazon is vast. You can search by title, author, genre, or age group, and the site will make recommendations based on your selection. You will also be able to see which books are frequently purchased together, which is great if your kids have a specific interest or are doing a school project. By running a search in the Kindle Store, you’ll also find free kids’ books that are on promotion for a limited time. If you check in regularly, you will be able to add to your kid’s ebook library without any extra expense. Your kids can read library books on a Kindle too If your local library subscribes to ebook providers like Hoopla or Overdrive, you can download their apps to your Kindle and check out a huge number of children’s books for free. Getting kids to read, both for pleasure and to learn more, should be the goal. Depending on your budget and requirements, you may prefer a kid-friendly device such as the Fire 7 Kids Pro Tablet, which has multiple applications, or the more reading-specific Kindle Kids, which we highly recommend. Either way, you’ll have a device that can store books to read independently or together with a parent or a caregiver. As your child gets older, their personal library can grow and change to suit their reading level and expanding interests.
Two news items about Sunnyvale, California-based Alta Devices drew attention recently. Alta Devices, first of all, has set a solar efficiency record for its single junction solar cell. Actually, this is the seventh time the company achieved such a distinction. As optics.org said, this was “the latest in a long series of cell or module records set by the Californian company.” These cells were certified by Fraunhofer ISE CalLab, a solar energy testing laboratory. In November, Alta Devices provided its single junction gallium arsenide solar cells to the lab. They were certified as being 29.1% efficient. The 29.1 figure beats a previous best by Alta of 28.9%. As you can see from the numbers, however, the increases are not startling. As optics.org commented, “the cell efficiency has improved only incrementally over the past few years.” The optics.org article added that “the record-setting cell is small in scale and not sufficiently developed for commercial use.” At the same time, the team behind the solar cells are achieving improvements and NASA is paying attention. The second reason Alta gained headlines this month: NASA is testing the Alta Devices technology at the International Space Station. NASA will be evaluating it for low-Earth orbit missions, and that includes CubeSats, a class of research spacecrafts. Specifically, the purpose of the test, said the company, is “to evaluate new solar cell and package technologies in support of future NASA missions requiring solar cells with high efficiency, high packing density, and very low mass.” So, these candidate cells are to gain exposure to the space environment. Alta Devices CEO, Jian Ding, seized the opportunity to praise the company’s solar cell advantage. “NASA’s interest in Alta’s record-setting performance demonstrates that our technology withstands some of the most challenging environments endured by autonomous systems in space, high altitude, and on land.” An array of nine cells was delivered to NASA earlier this year. The experiment was transported to the ISS by the NG-10 Antares rocket in November. “The solar cells will be installed into a zenith-facing position on the station in the coming weeks,” said the company. The company positioned its gallium arsenide solar technology as well suited to powering products requiring autonomous power—small satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous vehicles. “Gallium arsenide has several unique characteristics; high efficiency, excellent UV and radiation resistance, flexibility, and low weight. Alta chose to focus on gallium arsenide because of its intrinsic efficiency advantages, as well as its ability to generate electricity at high temperatures and in low light,” said the company. “Continuous advances in power-to-weight ratio are critical for tomorrow’s small satellites, autonomous UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), electric vehicles, and autonomous sensors.” After a year of exposure, the cells will be returned for evaluation to NASA and Alta Devices. There is another talking point about their use of GaAs—typically, it is expensive to produce. Alta invented a manufacturing technique that develops extremely thin layers of GaAs (a fraction of the thickness of other GaAs solar cells). Thin polymeric films were developed as cover slide materials for the solar cells. These “are exposed as separate samples, to measure atomic oxygen erosion yield and transmission changes due to ultraviolet radiation,” said the company. John Fitzgerald Weaver, meanwhile, offered a perspective on record-setting back in February. Writing in Electrek, he said that as far as assessing cell efficiencies, “much like the sport of professional boxing, there are many ‘record solar cell efficiencies’ because there are many product types [many different product types and their respective efficiencies].” Fast-forward to December and John Fitzgerald Weaver has a key point to make, this time, in pv magazine: setting a new single junction solar cell efficiency record of 29.1 percent was an efficiency story but the big deal was not the efficiency, it was the weight, which fell 30 percent. Weaver said, “and from the words of Alta Devices, its process has lowered material costs to ‘essentially nothing’.” This is what the company said: “Alta’s cells are about one micron thick; for comparison, a human hair is approximately 40 microns thick. By utilizing a very thin layer of material with the highest energy density possible, the amount of material needed is low. Therefore potential system costs can be dramatically reduced.” Weaver commented that “there’s reason to think that the future holds a place for Alta Devices and other higher efficiency technologies.”
Key Features:Patchwork flaking bark; Tolerant of air pollution; Beautiful historical tree; Excellent for pollarding; Wind resistant. As its common name suggests this tree is synonymous with the streets of London. It was planted extensively during the Victorian era and was credited for cleaning the atmosphere of the capital and many other British and Irish cities post the industrial revolution. The bark of the London Plane - which allowed the tree to breathe in times of smog filled cities - is now considered to be one of its finest ornamental attributes. The wonderful flaking bark reveals colours from green-white, light brown to dark grey. The London Plane provides an uplifting, cathedral-effect canopy but the boldly-lobed glossy leaves are sufficiently transparent to allow light and air movement to surrounding plants. After leaf fall, bauble like fruits on hanging capsules persist throughout winter and into spring. Platanus x hispanica is a large fast-growing majestic tree and if allowed to fully develop will often grow beyond 20 meters. It is however extremely tolerate of hard pruning (pollarding) and can be shaped accordingly, making it a viable choice for those with smaller gardens. Fully hardy.
Scottish National Dictionary (1700–) ETIN, Etyn, n. A giant; also used to denote a fury, witch, devil. Now only arch. Sc. 1826 R. Chambers Pop. Rhymes 281: The red-etin is a monstrous personage, supposed by the common people to be so named on account of his insatiable penchant for red or raw flesh. Sc. 1827 G. R. Kinloch Ancient Sc. Ballads 229: Till up started the Hynde Etin, Says, “Lady, let thae alane!” Knr. 1925 “H. Haliburton” Horace in Homespun 190: Lauchs till himsel', an' nods his pow, An' chuckles like a wee red etyn, “Ho! Ho! the famous winter shootin'!” Sc.(E) 1929 L. Spence in Holyrood (ed. W. H. Hamilton) 47: The tempests grey o' Norroway, Yon etins fell and dour, Hae blawn her hempen strands to strae. You may wish to vary the format shown below depending on the citation style used. "Etin n.". Dictionary of the Scots Language. 2004. Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd. Accessed 22 Jul 2019 <https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/etin> Try an Advanced Search
Sometimes it can be hard to imagine how we got here and why the world is the way it is. However, the oldest people in the world don’t have to imagine; they lived through some of the most defining moments of the past century. The events that made headlines when they were young ended up changing the world forever. Disasters caused new laws to be made, and tragic missteps in judgement affected millions. In the early 20th century, there were so many aspects of health and safety that we were still learning about. Here are the top ten events that the oldest folks in the world have lived through. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire The crowded and unsafe conditions of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were a perfect recipe for disaster. Fabric scraps in bins that were only emptied when they were full, inadequate escape routes, and sweatshop-style management all contributed to the massive loss of life that fateful day on March 25, 1911. Reports at the time speculated several possible causes for the fire, but the fire department concluded that the likely cause was an improperly extinguished match or cigarette. Once the fire began, the workers were left with few alternatives other than to jump from the windows, since the doors were locked by the management in an attempt to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks (the bathroom wasn’t even in the building) and the fire escapes had rusted through. To add to the confusion and loss, the fire department was using outdated and inappropriate tools for the job. Their ladders were not designed for tall buildings and the nets they used were damaged. 146 workers lost their lives that day, mostly women and many immigrants, which was about a third of the people employed by the company. The massive failure by the business and the city to protect its workers led to the widespread unionization and workers’ rights laws, as well as improved fire fighting equipment. Sinking of the Titanic The following year on April 15, 1912 — in what was another avoidable-tragedy made worse by poor judgement and the confines of the technology of the day — the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank. The disaster was a defining moment for people around the world. Headlines across the globe reported the staggering death toll, and the astounding circumstances surrounding the event. Ignored iceberg warnings combined with the troubled relationship between telegraph operators meant that the nearest ship, the Californian, never received the call to help (it was only 20 miles away). Instead, helped arrived from the Carpathia, several hours after the ship had sunk and the mismanaged life boats had failed to save a majority of the passengers. Interestingly, a safety drill to test and practice with the lifeboats earlier that day had been cancelled without explanation by Captain Edward J. Smith. Though it shocked the world, the disaster did lead to an increased and appropriate ratio of lifeboats-to-passengers on a ship. Items from the Titanic are still being found today and remain the subjects of fascination for many. West Virginia Coal Wars Stuck in a cycle of poverty, illness, and miseducation, coal miners at the turn of the century in West Virginia were in-effect held hostage by the large coal companies. Coal towns operated by these companies enforced their own rules, and all supplies had to be purchased from the company store. Children even attended the company schools. The health risks specific to coal mining are well-known today, but back then the concerns of the miners were not taken seriously. In an effort that lasted 8 years, coal miners sought to unionize, and wrench themselves from the control of their employers. When workers were not listened to, negotiations turned violent. The first of these bloody battles was in 1912 during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strikes. When their demands to become unionized were rejected, both sides began to arm themselves, with the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency brought to act as private police for the coal operators. The Matewan Massacre in 1920 was yet another clash in a long list of conflicts. The final battle too place at Blair Mountain in 1921, when federal troops were called in to fight against an army of 10,000 miners who had taken up arms against the coal companies. Not only were they angry about the mistreatment of miners, but also the assassination of the worker-leaders from the Matewan Massacre. It was not until the 1930s that coal miners had comprehensive representation.
Three examples for library engagement in trust: scholarly communication literacy, information quality and legal certainty. The role of libraries in the 21st century is changing. One indication is the emergence of new services and job profiles: libraries offer services to support researchers throughout the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of their research. In countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom academic libraries create special positions, aptly called “scholarly communication librarians”. The job profile requires core competencies in publication management, funder policies and mandates, rights management for publication and the measurement of scholarly impact. This set of requirements differs considerably from traditional library work: Nowadays, librarians get involved in the entire research process and surrounding conditions of scholarly publishing. In our opinion, the role of libraries in the research process of the 21st century is mainly to establish trust in the research process. In the following, we illustrate this new role using three examples for library engagement in trust: scholarly communication literacy, information quality and legal certainty. Scholarly communication literacy While the amount of published research output doubles every nine years (Van Noorden, 2014), the need for science communication and knowledge transfer to the general public is also gaining attention (Wissenschaftsrat, 2016). Part of this is a process called scholarly communication, referring to the creation, evaluation, dissemination and preservation of scholarly publications (Association of College & Research Libraries, 2003). Librarians active in scholarly communication help researchers to find a fitting journal in which to publish their findings and maximise the impact of their publications. In fact, being literate in scholarly communication systems makes librarians the perfect ally to researchers when publishing their outcomes. Additionally, librarians have a long tradition of supporting information literacy, so they are accustomed to sharing knowledge on how to find, evaluate and use information resources. The same increasingly applies to supporting researchers in strengthening their scholarly communication literacy—their ability to find, evaluate and disseminate their research to the community as well as understanding the different ways in which impact of scholarly output is measured. A study of job advertisements for library positions related to scholarly communication found, that “instruction” was the term mostly used in the job descriptions (Finlay et al., 2015). Scholarly communication is not an easy field to navigate for researchers, especially concerning publishing/publishers and journals. While most librarians generally are pushing for Open Access to publications, they also work with researchers to protect them from falling prey to so called predatory publishers. These publishers take advantage of the “publish or perish” attitude prevailing in science and the need for academics to publish their work. This harmful model exploits the payment of article processing charges (APCs) to the journal by the researcher for publishing their manuscript Open Access. Predatory journals pose as ordinary journals to the researcher, while providing none of the quality assurance that legitimate Open Access journals offer in return to the APC charges, such as peer review, discoverability and long term access. It might be confusing for researchers to distinguish quality and reputation from the business model of journals—higher APCs do not guarantee higher quality standards. Researchers can consult with librarians before submitting a manuscript to a journal they had no personal experience with—librarians have the skills to evaluate the trustworthiness of journals. In fact, the first list of predatory publishers to keep track of non-authoritative journals was started in 2008 by a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver—Jeffrey Beall. Surrounded by much controversy, Beall eventually took down the list in January of 2017, but it has been reincarnated by an anonymous group with a project called “Stop predatory publishing” running on GitHub. Other initiatives to tackle predatory publishing librarians and information specialists are involved in are the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which indexes high quality open access journals and the “Think, check, submit”-campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals. Libraries are traditionally equipped to evaluate information sources and this is still the case for digital information resources. Librarians are trained to identify and interpret metadata, which describe the information source. They can help researchers figure out, if the information actually is what it seems to be (authenticity), if it has been altered in any way (integrity) and if it has been provided by a trustworthy source (provenance). In recent years, libraries have expanded their responsibilities to include the management of research data. The quality of datasets and their description (metadata) are essential for potential reuse. Metadata quality is ensured by the implementation of standards, such as the DataCite Metadata Schema. By offering the standardized description and versioning, the schema enables others to understand and evaluate datasets. Preceding the publication of research outputs, including research data, several funders require researchers to write Data Management Plans (DMPs) which document the creation of datasets as well as strategies for sharing and preservation (Harting & Soßna, 2016). Libraries have developed a number of tools to facilitate writing these plans. Trustworthy information is at the core of all scientific discovery. Still, science is experiencing a replication crisis: the inability to reproduce research results. According to a survey published in Nature, the vast majority of respondents failed to reproduce an experiment (Baker, 2016). Although replicability is not a universal indicator for good science, as the biggest German research funding organization DFG points out, the replication crisis sparks debates about trust in research results (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 2017). Libraries are important partners in supporting these productive debates. They offer services aimed at making research data openly available and have the potential to act as “data quality hubs” (Giarlo, 2013). By publishing the underlying data and linking it to the text publication, results become more transparent (Sayre and Riegelman, 2018). Researchers can encourage trust in research results by taking advantage of these services and working with librarians during the research and publication process. Uncertainty regarding legal aspects is a significant barrier to Open Science. Libraries have a long tradition in mediating researchers‘ interests and the law. With new research practices emerging, libraries try to include current needs in this process. In recent years, legal issues became especially apparent in the context of research data. As funders and universities increasingly advocate the publication of research data, legal concerns such as data ownership and protection of privacy emerged. German libraries are aware of these issues and are working on information material and support services for researchers. Another source of uncertainty is „green Open Access“. Green Open Access refers to the practice of uploading a version of a work that was published in a paywalled journal to a repository and thereby making it openly available. Journal policies regarding green Open Access can be confusing. Researchers considering uploading their scholarly output to Open Access repositories may be put off by this legal gray area. In order to clarify the legal status of green Open Access, the German Bundestag enacted a secondary publication right for copyright owners under certain conditions (Bruch and Pflüger, 2014). Libraries support green Open Access by providing researchers with necessary information regarding journal policies (SHERPA/RoMEO), Open Access repositories (OpenDOAR) and secondary publication rights. Librarians are proficient in the use of open content licenses, such as Creative Commons. Open content licenses allow the copyright owner to give others permission to share and use a work while clearly stating conditions for the (re-)use. Therefore, open content licenses are an essential tool for making research more inclusive and transparent. Libraries can help researchers choose adequate licenses for their works. Another area with legal implications is the access to information. Right now, the access to research output is subject to major transformations. Due to rising journal subscription costs, libraries are shifting from a subscription-based model to supporting Open Access. At the same time, Sci-Hub—the largest of the so-called „shadow libraries“—offers access to approximately 70% of all scholarly literature with a DOI (Himmelstein et al., 2018). Although shadow libraries offer convenient and almost complete access, using them is a legal gray area under German copyright law (Steinhauer, 2016). In order to provide an acceptable and legal basis for the access to research output, Project DEAL negotiates nationwide licensing agreements with big publishers. Almost 200 libraries support the negotiations with Elsevier, one of the biggest publishers, by cancelling subscriptions. Libraries also promote open infrastructures for Open Access, such as Open Journal Systems. By pooling financial resources and funding initiatives such as the Open Library of Humanities, libraries support the transition of existing journals to an Open Access publishing model without article processing charges in the humanities. The digitization of the research process and dissemination has certainly shown positive effects, for example on the increased availability of research results and new approaches to measure impact. But it has also led to a number of problems researchers have to face. Due to the large amount of information resources available through new forms of scholarly publications, it might be difficult for researchers to assess the quality of information sources. It can also be challenging to identify high quality journals and to navigate legal implications. Trust in research results, stakeholders, infrastructures and services is a prerequisite for quality of research in general. Although trust is difficult to measure, we argue that it can be built through continued working relationships. Trust is dependent on experiences that have been made throughout these partnerships. The more researchers and librarians work together, the better the understanding of each other’s perspectives on research practices and communication of research outputs is developed. As we have discussed above, librarians can secure a great amount of trust in different areas. Researchers and librarians can work together to improve their skills and the quality of research output. Although these collaborations can be beneficial, it is still up to both parties to become partners. We recommend researchers to closely work with librarians—they can offer valuable assistance to the entire research process. Accordingly, librarians should also take a more active role in detecting researchers’ needs, as these may change due to emerging research practices. Librarians need to communicate their skills to researchers as they may not be aware of them. We propose close collaborations with faculty members who can act as multipliers among their colleagues. If researchers and librarians work together, they can secure trust in the research process of the 21st century.
- the purpose of this lab is to observe how different factors effect the rate of reaction in different reactions. - refrences: handout- "factors that affect reaction rate" STATION reaction/variablereaction timeobservations 1Mg ribbon in HCL/3M HCL - 0:053M - reacted rapidly concentration (M)1M HCL - 1:461M - dissolved slowly 2Alka-seltzer in water/Hot water - 1:20Hot- turned blue veryfast and dissolved quickly Cold - slowly reactedtemperature (C°)Cold water - 3+ mins 3metals in HCL/Mg- 0:36Mg- dissolved fast type of metalZn- 3+ minZn- dissolved slowly Cu- 3+ minCu- no visible rxn 4Marble in HCL/marble chip: 3+ minChip- slowly dissolved surface area of solutepowder- 2:26 secPowder- quickly dissolved 5Decomposition ofN/AWhen MnO2 was added the H2O2 turned black and bubbled. H2O2/ Catalyst (MnO2) In this lab we took reactions and added different factors to them to see how the rate of reaction was affected. In station 1 we dissolved Mg ribbons in 3M and 1M solutions of HCL. The ribbon dissolved in the 3M HCL in 5 seconds, while the ribbon in the 1M HCL dissolved in 1 minute 43 seconds. This proved that higher concentrations speed up reactions. In station 2 we put 1/4 of an aska-seltzer tab in hot water and another one in old water. The tab in hot water dissolved much faster than the tab in the cold water. This proved that the higher the temperature, the faster the reaction will be. In station 3 we put different metals in 3M HCL; Mg, Zn, and Cu. The Mg dissolved in 31 seconds, the Zn took over 3 minutes and the Cu had no visible reaction. This proved that different types of metals dissolve and react at different rates. In station 4 we put a marble chip in 1M HCL and powdered marble chips in 1M HCL. The marble powder took 2:32 minutes to dissolve while the...
From nature we extract resources to power our economy — energy, water, soil, minerals, fish and animals. What right have we to squander them? Conservation is how we can ensure there are still bountiful supplies of natural resources for generations to come. The end goal of resource conservation is to use natural resources — especially non-renewable resources — sustainably. This we do through efficiency, reducing demand, substitution with renewable resources (such as renewable power), and recycling. Conserving resources also makes good economic sense, whether you are trying to save money at home, reducing costs at work, or designing a more resilient economy.
Fizzy research no deterrent Some Timaru consumers are not put off soft drinks despite research showing the effects of sugar sweetened drink could lead to Alzheimer's disease or cancer. Analysis undertaken on rats by Sydney's Macquarie University behavioural neuropharmacology lab found sugar sweetened drinks could change proteins produced in the brain. Twenty per cent of the proteins related to decision-making were different in the rats that drank sugary drinks compared to those rats that had been given water. Jane Franklin and Jennifer Cornish who worked on the project found the sugary drink rodent group was significantly more hyperactive than the control group. "Hyperactivity is a physical sign that something unusual is happening in the brain and is probably a reflection of changes being made to return the system back to its pre-sugar state, after it had adjusted to prolonged sugar consumption," Ms Franklin said. Out of six people spoken to by the South Canterbury Herald, on the data, only one did not drink soft drinks. Gerald Winter said he gave up drinking fizzy drinks because he no longer liked them. Timaru student Kevin Flowers drank soft drink every day but unless he had proof that the fluid was causing damage to his brain was reluctant to change his habits. His mother Debbi Chamberlain consumes about three cans of diet coke a day. She said her grandmother had never drunk soft drinks and always ate healthily and now suffered with alzheimers. "I do not think it (sugary drinks) make an impact," Ms Chamberlain said. Cody Winchester a supermarket worker said he had been drinking fizzy most of his life and did not think he had been affected by it so was not concerned. Other young adults approached and shown the research were not keen to make changes unless they saw definitive proof of its negative impacts. Only apprentice hairdresser Sarah Curry said she may opt for milk instead. While more work is needed to determine the exact effect of these changes, just under half of the altered proteins are known to be involved in the cellular function of the brain, including determining cellular life span, communication and DNA repair. Thirty per cent of the changed proteins are linked with conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia. SOUTH CANTERBURY HERALD - South Canterbury
Sapoche is a delicious and nutritious fruit. In addition, the bark, leaves and green fruit of the tree are also used by folk folk to treat diarrhea, digestive disorders, stop bleeding, prevent tooth decay, and clear urine. Other names: Sapoche, Sapodilla, Jam Cage Sapodilla contains a variety of chemical components, including: Seeds containing xyanhhydric acid and 23% fatty oil. Green fruits and resins contain plastic gum, which contains 1.7% carbohydrate, 40% plastic, 35% water and some other substances. Young bark contains some alkaloid, tannin and saponin In 100 grams of ripe sapodilla fruit contains calories 83 mg, protein 0.44 g, fat 1.10 g, fiber 1.40 g, calcium 21 mg, iron 0.80 mg, phosphorus 12 mg, potassium 193 mg, sodium 12 mg, beta -carotene (A) 60 IU, riboflavin (B2) 0.020 mg, niacin (B3) 0.200 mg, pantothenic acid (B5) 0.252 mg, Pyridoxine (B6) 0.037 mg, vitamin C 14.7mg ... Instant energy replenishment: The high glucose content in sapodilla provides the body with sugar for a few minutes. That's why this fruit is great for those who need extra energy like pregnant women, growing children, and athletes. In addition, with high levels of carbohydrates and essential nutrients, sapodilla offers many benefits for pregnant and lactating mothers. Prevent constipation, diarrhea: Sapodilla contains more fiber (about 5.6 g / 100 g), reduces the risk of constipation, while also supporting colon cells and increase the ability to fight infections. . Therefore, this is a very effective laxative. Besides, sapodilla also a rich source of tannins and polyphenolic - substances beneficial to the digestive tract. Sapodilla will help eliminate waste, clean the stomach leading to reduced diarrhea. Antidepressant: Like a sedative, sapodilla helps to soothe the nerves and reduce stress. Therefore, people who suffer from insomnia, anxiety and depression are often advised to eat this fruit. Helps strengthen bones: One of the health benefits of sapodilla is very rich in calcium. Therefore, it is very beneficial for women with osteoporosis. Good for the eyes: Sapodilla fruit is a very high content of vitamin A. According to many studies, vitamin A helps improve vision, even in old age. So, to maintain good eyesight, you should eat sapodilla regularly. Preventing cancer: The antioxidants, fiber and nutrients found in this fruit also help protect the body against cancer. For example, vitamin A protects the body from cancers of the lung and oral cavity Anti-inflammatory, preventing bacteria: The content of tannins in sapodilla is considered an excellent anti-inflammatory. Besides helping to prevent diseases such as esophagitis, enteritis, irritable bowel syndrome and gastritis, tannins also reduce swelling and pain. The polyphenol antioxidants found in this fruit help the body fight the invasion of viruses, fight parasites and antibacterial.Vitamin C blocks free radicals that are harmful to the body. Iron, folate, niacin and pantothenic help the digestive system function properly. Hemostasis: Sapodilla can prevent bleeding in cases of injury. The seeds of this fruit are also used to reduce mosquito bites and insect bites. 4. Production process: Selecting and receiving raw materials – Soaking 1 – Picking stalks – Soaking 2 – Freezing – Weighing – PA packaging – Metal detection – Carton packing – labeling – Warehouse storage -18 degrees C – Distribution. 5. Product pictures:
Gardening Courses to Get Your Plants Growing and Flourishing PCC Community Education \| Start the discussion It’s gardening season again in Portland! Join PCC Community Ed for Home & Garden courses to acquire new ideas to beautify your yard, manage or design your perfect garden, care for your vegetation – or learn to produce your own food! All it takes for success is to know some basic facts about how plants grow best and a desire to get outside and “play in the dirt” on a regular basis. Click here to search for Garden, Nature and Yard courses. Growing Organic Vegetables Organic foods from backyard gardens are growing in popularity. People like that they don’t contain mysterious – and potentially dangerous – man-made substances. This form of gardening is also better for the environment. Growing organically lets you tap into two of today’s common concerns: health and sustainability. Many techniques for growing organic vegetables are similar to those who prefer to garden with assistance from chemicals. Proper pruning, planting times, and variety selection are keys to success. However, the “organic” aspect requires some adaptations. First, you need to pay more attention to the soil since you won’t be able to simply throw down fertilizer to make up for deficiencies. Build up the soil and improve its drainage by using organic compost, and choose natural fertilizers to beef up its nutritional profile. Compost itself is a fertilizer, but you can add manure, fish tea, and other natural materials for even more soil nutrition. Choosing the Right Plants In the Pacific Northwest, you can expect cool and wet weather. This create a great environment for cool-season plants like arugula, spinach, radishes, bok choy, mustard greens, turnips, peas, fava beans, and more. In the summer, plant tomatoes, peppers, and other heat-loving vegetables. Why Grow Vegetables? Growing your own vegetables may result in better-tasting produce. You also save a significant amount of money. People who buy organic produce from a store often find it unaffordable, but for a gardener, it is nearly free! In fact, if the time you spend on labor isn’t included as a cost, a vegetable garden is technically a profit source. That’s because for the average $238 spent on supplies, you can expect to get $677 worth of produce back. Finally, you know exactly what, if anything, was put onto the produce before you consume it. Flowers and Other Non-Edible Plants Is a garden really complete without a few flowers and ornamentals? For the most environmentally-friendly flower garden, grow native Oregon plants. These are adapted to our local conditions, so they require less fertilizer, watering, and pesticides. This reduces problems with runoff, flooding, and pollution. Ornamentals are good for wildlife, err, the Portland city limits equivalent. Many produce berries or seeds that serve as food for birds and other creatures. Therefore, planting them leads to more beauty than the plants themselves provide, as colorful wildlife arrives to get the free food. If you’d like to get started with organic gardening, or you’d like to improve your current gardening skills, check out the Garden, Nature and Yard classes offered by PCC. These will give you the head start you need for beautiful results. Here at PCC, we also offer a number of other classes on outdoor production, including backyard chicken keeping, beekeeping, permaculture, and herb gardening. These will allow you to produce much of your own food and beautify your landscape in ways that are healthy for both you and your environment. Check them out and sign up for the ones that interest you most! Other Home, Garden and Yard courses offered this term: Growing Plants for Fun and Profit Organic Vegetable Gardening: Basics for Beginners Cool Season Vegetable Crops Warm Season Vegetable Crops Clay Garden Markers Designing and Planting a Forest Garden Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy Planet Foundations of Permaculture Backyard Beekeeping: Beginning Culinary Herb and Edible Flower Gardening Home Gardening Series with Rod Smith Trees, Shrubs and Roses Annuals, Perennials and Bulbs Growing Fruits, Vegetables and Herbs Insects and Diseases Diseases and Weeds Watering and Irrigation Maximize your Yard with Permaculture Design Foundations of Permaculture
\|Comune di Monselice\| \|Frazioni\|\|Marendole, Monticelli, Ca' Oddo, San Cosma, San Bortolo, Carmine\| \|• Mayor\|\|Giorgia Bedin Lega Nord (2019)\| \|• Total\|\|50.57 km2 (19.53 sq mi)\| \|Elevation\|\|9 m (30 ft)\| \|• Density\|\|350/km2 (900/sq mi)\| \|Time zone\|\|UTC+1 (CET)\| \|• Summer (DST)\|\|UTC+2 (CEST)\| \|Saint day\|\|November 2\| "Monselice is the most picturesque town I have seen in Italy. It has an old ruin of a castle upon the hill and thence commands a beautiful and extraordinary view. It lies in the wide plain – a dead level – whereon Ferrara, Bologna, Rovigo, Este, Padua stand and even Venice we could dimly see in the horizon rising with her tiara of proud towers. What a walk and what a wide delightful picture. To Venice 38 miles." (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, [31 May 1833]) The earliest known documents about Monselice date back to 568 AD and are related to the conquest of the town by the Lombards. The town was under Byzantine rule for a brief period until its conquest by king Agilulf around 602. During the Comuni period (12th century) the town had its own local self-government. The town was aligned with the Ghibellines against the Guelphs in the political and military fights of the 13th century. The Ghibelline leader Ezzelino III da Romano improved the town's fortifications and made it one of the main strongholds of the area. In 1866 it became part of the Kingdom of Italy. The modern town lies in a wide valley between the Montericco, elevation 312 metres (1,024 ft), and the Rocca, elevation 110 metres (360 ft), hills (part of the Euganean Hills). The oldest part of the town lies around the Rocca hill. In medieval times the Rocca was heavily fortified with five girdle walls that are partially still visible today. Important points for tourists can be the central square Piazza Mazzini with the medieval Torre Civica (Civic Tower) and the Palazzo del Monte di Pietà (Public Pawn Palace). This building hosts the local touristic promotion board (Pro Loco), that provides information for visits to the town's historical attractions. Piazza Mazzini square is also the starting point for the promenade walk along Via del Santuario, leading to the most interesting sites of the town, which include: - The Castle of Monselice (or Castello Cini), which houses one of the most important collections of European medieval weapons and armors. - Villa Nani - The Romanesque church of Santa Giustina (12th century). - The Seven Churches Sanctuary (Santuario delle Sette Chiese or Via Romana) with paintings by Palma il Giovane. Pietro Duodo (1554–1610), a Venetian patrician, committed to architect Vincenzo Scamozzi the project for the Santuario delle Sette Chiese. In 1606, Pope Paul V issued a papal bull that granted to pilgrims visiting the Sanctuary the same Catholic indulgencies granted to pilgrims visiting the seven main churches (basiliche) of Rome, hence the Romanis basilicis pares inscription on the portal of the sanctuary. - Villa Duodo, designed by Scamozzi. - The Keep (Mastio or Torrione), still standing on the Rocca hilltop. It is a tower built with regular trachyte blocks from local quarries. A lively market is held every Monday in the town's main streets. An important fair is traditionally held every year around November 1 (All Saints Day - saint patron day for the town). Attractions include a food and general market, local food stands, fun park, exhibits. Started in recent years, the "Palio di Monselice" tournament has become a primary attraction. The Palio is held every year in September. It is modeled after medieval horse tournaments and it includes several other competitions: archery, chess tournament (also in the form of human chess), musicians tournament (with tambourines and "chiarine"), flag-flyers, millstone challenge and the parade of nine "contrade" in period costume. Monselice railway station is on the Venice-Padua-Bologna-Florence line, between Padua (North) and Bologna (South). A secondary railway line connects Monselice to the town of Mantua in Lombardy. Monselice is twinned with: - Città della Speranza, Italy, since 2006 - Poreč, Croatia, since 2010 - Niepołomice, Poland, since 2011 - Parkano, Finland, since 2015 - "Superficie di Comuni Province e Regioni italiane al 9 ottobre 2011". Istat. Retrieved 16 March 2019. - "Popolazione Residente al 1° Gennaio 2018". Istat. Retrieved 16 March 2019. - ‹See Tfd›(in Italian) Civil registry ISTAT web site. - Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, 4.25; translated by William Dudley Foulke, 1907 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1974), p. 168 \|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Monselice.\| - Town map[permanent dead link] - Monselice Turismo (Monselice touristic portal) - The Castle of Monselice (Ca' Marcello) - Touristic Promotion Board (Pro Loco, in Italian) - A selection of Monselice postcards - Ralph Waldo Emerson's impressions of Monselice
Where’s the Nearest Airport? New Diagram Shows—for Every Place on Earth Max Ehrenfreund shares news of a map by Jason Davies that uses a Voronoi diagram to illustrate the “airport that is nearest to every point on the surface of the earth.” Davies chose to represent large airports with scheduled services, expanding on an earlier, similar diagram for airports of all sizes just in the United States. In case you’re wondering what the world’s most remote airport is, or where the world’s most remote location relative to any airport is, Davies’s own website directs you to the spot. In the case of the latter, it's in in Antarctica—5,147km from the nearest three airports
“Did you know that changing a little bit your eating habits, it is possible to bring down the blood pressure naturally? Recent reports have shown that diets rich in potassium, magnesium and calcium can help reduce and control high blood pressure no saturated fat, sugar and salt. Here’s a list of eight types of food recommended to lower blood pressure. Spinach is rich in magnesium and help prevent cardiovascular disease. They also contain folate, which prevents the increase in homocysteine, which in excess can increase the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke. Cook them as little time as possible or better yet eat them raw in salads. Sunflower seeds are rich in potassium, magnesium and phytosterols which can help reduce cholesterol levels (an abnormally large cholesterol can narrow the arteries and blood vessels which helps of course to raise blood pressure). Bananas are rich in potassium and is high in fiber. Try to eat at least 2 bananas a day. All fats or oils are not always unhealthy,sometimes it is far from it! Unsaturated oils can help reduce the level of ‘bad’ cholesterol and provide the body with essential fatty acids it requires. Fish containing omega-3 fatty acids prevent the risk of cardiovascular disease. Trout, salmon, mackerel and sardines are rich in fish omega-3. It is best to cook on the grill or steam. Do not add salt in cooking. It is best to eat fresh fish but if you anyways want to eat salt try just a little bit! There are also dietary supplements salmon oil rich in unsaturated fatty acids Omega 3 (EPA and DHA). Garlic acts against atherosclerosis and hypertension. Eat at least four cloves of garlic per day. Tomatoes are rich in calcium and potassium and contain vitamin A, C and E. Tomatoes also contain lycopene which is a powerful antioxidant that is known to prevent cardiovascular disease. The antioxidants found in tomatoes can prevent you from bad cholesterol from oxidizing and adhere to blood vessel walls (which would favor an increase in blood pressure). Broccoli is rich in potassium but it also contains chromium which helps regulate blood glucose and insulin. Do not cook them ! Cook it with just the right amount of water needed to cover it and it will not lose its nutrients. It would be best to eat raw
STONEHENGE LATEST NEWS LASER SCANNING REVEALS ROCK ART AND SHAPING METHODS Following a detailed laser scan of Stonehenge last year, an analysis has just been published by English Heritage. It reveals many more axe carvings and much new information on how the stones were shaped. The analysis found 71 new axehead carvings, increasing the number known at Stonehenge to 115. The design of the axeheads belong to a specific period in the Early Bronze Age around 1750-1500BC. This is around a 1000 years after the big sarsen stone circle was erected. Contrary to press reports, Stonehenge was not a huge art gallery - these carvings are found only on four stones. The scanning has also revealed incredible detail on how the stones were shaped. Some were "pecked" with stone mauls in horizontal lines, others with vertical lines. The study, just published online by English Heritage and free to download, also provides information on how much damage has been caused by souvenir hunters chipping off bits of stone, or by visitors carving graffiti - including Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of 17th century London! Download the full report here: GEOPHYSICAL SURVEY REVEALS NEW HENGE The discovery of a previously unknown henge monument has been found close to Stonehenge. Using the latest geophysical imaging techniques, which "see" below the ground without excavation, it is possible to make out a dark circle of interrupted ditch. There are two wider gaps opposite each other - these were entrances to the monument and are aligned on the midwinter sunset and midsummer sunrise - like Stonehenge itself. Inside the ditch it is also possible to discern the slight shadows of 24 postholes encircling the the central area, 25 metres in diameter. Near the centre are more dark areas indicating pits, and a large shadow suggesting that a mound was constructed there, perhaps in a later phase of the monument's use. The henge probably dates to around 2500-3000BC, contemporary with Stonehenge. History is set to be rewritten after an archaeology team led by the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Austria discovered a major ceremonial monument less than one kilometre away from the iconic Stonehenge. The incredible find has been hailed by Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, as one of the most significant yet for those researching the UK’s most important prehistoric structure. The new henge was uncovered this week, just two weeks into a three-year international study that forms part of the multi-million Euro international Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project. The project aims to map 14 square kilometres of the Stonehenge Landscape using the latest geophysical imaging techniques, to recreate visually the iconic prehistoric monument and its surroundings and transform how we understand this unique landscape and its monuments. “This finding is remarkable,” Professor Gaffney said. “It will completely change the way we think about the landscape around Stonehenge. “People have tended to think that as Stonehenge reached its peak it was the paramount monument, existing in splendid isolation. “This discovery is completely new and extremely important in how we understand Stonehenge and its landscape.” The new “henge-like” Late Neolithic monument is believed to be contemporaneous to Stonehenge and appears to be on the same orientation as the World Heritage Site monument. It comprises a segmented ditch with opposed north-east/south-west entrances that are associated with internal pits that are up to one metre in diameter and could have held a free-standing, timber structure. The project, which is supported by the landowner, the National Trust, and facilitated by English Heritage, has brought together the most sophisticated geophysics team ever to be engaged in a single archaeological project in Britain. British partners are the University of Birmingham; the Division of Archaeological, Geographical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bradford; and the Department of Earth Science at the University of St Andrews. European partners include teams from Austria, Germany, Norway and Sweden. Professor Gaffney, who this week won the Best Archaeological Book prize at the prestigious British Archaeological Awards for Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland, added: “Stonehenge is one of the most studied monuments on Earth but this demonstrates that there is still much more to be found.” Professor Wolfgang Neubauer, Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, adds: "This is just the beginning. We will now map this monument using an array of technologies that will allow us to view this new discovery, and the landscape around it, in three dimensions. This marks a new departure for archaeologists and how they investigate the past." Martin Papworth, of the National Trust, said: “The Hidden Landscapes project is providing cutting edge archaeological survey work that will greatly enhance understanding and improve conservation management for the National Trust on its Stonehenge Estate.” Dr Christopher Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, comments: “The strategy that we are implementing within this project has provided a first glimpse of new and important information regarding the hidden past at Stonehenge. We aim to cover large areas around Stonehenge and we expect this to be the first of many significant discoveries.” Dr Amanda Chadburn, Stonehenge archaeologist at English Heritage, said: "This new monument is part of a growing body of evidence which shows how important the summer and winter solstices were to the ancient peoples who built Stonehenge. The discovery is all the more remarkable given how much research there has been in the vicinity of Stonehenge, and emphasises the importance of continuing research within and around the World Heritage Site." Mr Paul Garwood, prehistorian at the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham, said “This discovery is of great importance for our understanding of the Stonehenge landscape in the 3rd millennium BC. Its location, a short distance from Stonehenge, and the fact that the two monuments were inter-visible, raises exciting new questions about the complex sacred landscape that existed around Stonehenge when the sarsen and bluestone monument was constructed.” Bluestone henge discovered 2009 In 2009 a major new discovery was made by the Stonehenge Riverside Project in the Stonehenge landscape. Evidence for a second stone circle was found close to the River Avon, linked to Stonehenge itself by the Stonehenge Avenue. The circle is just under 10m in diameter and was surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank – with an entrance to the east. The henge ditch is 25m in diameter and sits at the end of the 1¾-mile avenue that leads from Stonehenge to the river. Excavations in 2008 established that this outer henge was built around 2400 BC but arrowheads from the stone circle indicate that it is likely to be much earlier, dating to around 3000 BC. Nine stone holes were identified, part of a circle of probably twenty-five standing stones. Only the northeast quadrant of the circle, and a small past of its west side, were excavated. Six stoneholes (A-F) were found in the northeast quadrant and three (I-K) were found in the western trench. (Stoneholes G and H are putative stone sockets lying between the excavated ones; their positions are extrapolated from the known stones). The centres of Stoneholes A-F are spaced at an average distance of 1.12m from each other. However, Stoneholes J and K are more widely spaced. Given the arrangement and curvature of the known stones, the maximum number of stones in the circle was 25. It may, of course, have contained fewer. The dimensions of the holes are too wide and too shallow for them to have held wooden posts. The imprints of the stones’ bases and the shapes of the sockets from which they were withdrawn indicate that these were too small to have been sarsens. They compare exactly with the dimensions of the bluestones in the inner oval at Stonehenge. The stones were extracted whole and were not broken up (as was the practice in the Medieval period). As a result, only two bluestone fragments were found, both of spotted dolerite. The bluestone circle was succeeded by a henge, comprising a circular ditch 23.4m wide with an external bank. Little trace of the henge bank remains except where it was pushed back into the ditch on its north side. A date from the tip of a broken antler pick in its basal fill places its construction within the period 2470-2280 BC. The henge had at least one entrance – this was on its east side where the northern ditch terminal contained a special deposit of antlers, an antler pick, cattle bones and stone and flint tools as well as a burnt organic container. We found the riverside end of the Stonehenge Avenue (previously only traced to a spot 150m to the north). It consisted of two parallel ditches, 18.1m apart. These formerly held upright posts, forming a small palisade on either side. The Avenue was traced to within a few metres of the henge ditch and presumably terminated at or close to the outer bank of the henge. It and the henge may have been built at the same time given their proximity and symmetrical positioning. The western arm of the henge’s ditch silted up gradually during the Bronze Age, with silts interspersed with flint cobble surfaces in the ditch bottom. After the ditch had fully silted up, its northeastern quadrant was re-cut. The henge’s interior was also re-used in the Late Bronze Age with the digging of a small penannular ditch which terminated at its northeast in a large timber post. This and two other posts formed a façade or structure within the centre of the henge. A fourth posthole on the west side of the ditch contained tiny fragments of clay metalworking moulds. The next phase of activity was during the Medieval period, specifically within the 13th century, when a complex series of east-west and north-south ditches were dug and filled. Ditches and pits continued to be dug into the post-Medieval period. Although there was no evidence for domestic occupation during the Neolithic, the riverside was inhabited during the Mesolithic (8000-4000 BC) and during the Bronze Age (2200-700 BC). Until radiocarbon dates on antler picks give us firm dates for construction and dismantling of the stone circle, our best dating evidence is from the two arrowheads found in the stonehole packing deposits. These are ‘chisel arrowheads’ which were current between 3400 BC and 2500 BC. They are earlier than the ‘oblique arrowheads’ (2500-2300 BC) and ‘barbed-and-tanged arrowheads’ (2300-1700 BC), styles found at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. In 2008, the Stonehenge Riverside Project’s excavation at Stonehenge itself found evidence that the first phase of Stonehenge (3000-2935 BC) consisted of a bluestone circle set inside the ditch and bank. These stone sockets are the 56 Aubrey Holes that form the outermost ring. Around 2500 BC the bluestones were re-arranged in the centre of Stonehenge and numbered about 80 stones. Where did the extra 24 or so stones come from? We think we know the answer! (Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Julian Thomas and Kate Welham; Stonehenge Riverside Project) STONEHENGE IS A CEMETERY Just published, in the archaeological journal Antiquity, are two studies arising from recent work by the Stonehenge Riverside Project. The first uses the latest radiocarbon dates from cremation burials - of which there may have been 240 - to suggest that the site served as a cemetery for a ruling dynasty from around 3000BC. For some 600 years members of the growing dynasty were buried in and around the outer ditch and Aubrey Holes - which now seem to be where the bluestones originally stood. The second study relates to the Stonehenge Cursus, now dated from a radiocarbon date from an antler to the mid 4th Millennium - so it was constructed hundreds of years before the first phase of Stonehenge. THE STONEHENGE RIVERSIDE PROJECT Last summer the Stonehenge Riverside Project was excavating at Stonehenge. The Stonehenge Riverside Project has now completed its seventh year of a ten-year programme. During August-September 2009 there were 50 archaeologists working on site. It is partly funded by the National Geographic. There were excavations in various locations in the landscape around Stonehenge, each designed to answer a specific question. The Stonehenge Avenue A series of trenches were opened along the Avenue. One near the Heel Stone, re-opened a trench dug by Professor Richard Atkinson in 1956. It was not clear from his poorly published accounts whether a series of gulleys parallel to the banks of the Avenue were natural periglacial features or not - perhaps an earlier Avenue. The new trench may also uncover evidence for rows of standing stones along the Avenue's banks. Other trenches have been opened at the 'elbow' of the Avenue, where it swings east; and another at the far end of the Avenue where it meets the River Avon in West Amesbury (on private land). Aubrey Hole 7 The Project was given a special licence to remove a group of cremated human remains from Aubrey Hole 7, just inside the bank which encircles Stonehenge. The cremations had been excavated from a number of Aubrey Holes by William Hawley in the 1920s, but were reburied (as there were no techniques to study them) in a single hole, Aubrey Hole 7 in 1935. New methods are now available to learn a great deal from the cremated bones. The cremations are required by law to be reburied within two years. The Stonehenge Cursus Excavations are now in progress at the east end of the Stonehenge Cursus, a long (3 km) enclosure, dating to around 3,500BC - 500 years older than the first stage of Stonehenge. Here the relationship of the Cursus to a Long Barrow is being investigated. The aerial photograph below shows the eastern half of the Cursus following for part of its length a line of trees. Stonehenge palisade and Later Neolithic settlement When the pedestrian underpass was constructed at Stonehenge in the 1960s, the terminal of a ditch, which once held a palisade, was uncovered. Last year geophysical survey traced the line of the palisade to the NE, towards Stonehenge Bottom, and SW onto Stonehenge Down where it branches into an enclosure. Surface scatters of lithics and Peterborough-type pottery indicate the presence of Later Neolithic activity which may derive from a settlement, possibly occupied during the earlier third millennium BC, contemporary with the earlier phases of Stonehenge. The most charming of this year's discoveries on the Palisade was a small animal carved out of chalk. It's about the size of a matchbox. With its four tiny feet and its pointed nose, it could represent a hedgehog. As it was found close to the skeleton of an infant, it's being suggested that it was a toy. But it's not neolithic: the infant and hedgehog came from an Iron Age pit containing a pot dating to around 450-100BC. So the child who was buried with his/her favourite toy, knew Stonehenge when it was over 2000 years old. The stone-dressing area outside Stonehenge An auger survey in March 2008 confirmed that there is a large and dense concentration of sarsen chippings immediately west of the start of the Stonehenge avenue (adjacent to the visitors’ centre). This may have been an area where the Stonehenge sarsens were dressed before erection since pieces of sarsen recovered from coring (and previously observed within molehills) include chips with the outer cortex still remaining (i.e. deriving from the working of previously undressed sarsen stones). Through excavation of a relatively small area within this sarsen spread, the archaeologists are learning much about how the stone-working was done, how it was organised and whether there are associated structures or working areas. In the 2006 and 2007 seasons, a fine group of foundations for nine houses were found by the eastern entrance to Durrington Walls, complete with plaster floors, hearths and oval stake settings. What Else is happening at Stonehenge? In April 2008, a new excavation began at Stonehenge. Led by Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Tim Darvill, the trench measured only 2.5 x 3.5 metres, but may answer some key questions about the date and origin of an early phase of Stonehenge - a double bluestone circle. Today you can view the circle of bluestones among the much larger sarsen stones, but early in the third millennium BC, perhaps in the 27th century BC, they were erected in different positions - according to stone-holes found in the 1950s. The excavations lasted only two weeks, but will be followed by scientific tests on the petrology (mineral composition) of any bluestone fragments recovered. Was the first bluestone circle made from stone brought from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales, 250km away? Tim Darvill and Geoff Wainwright have been excavated at the quarry in Wales where the bluestones were extracted. Tim, in his book Stonehenge: Biography of Landscape suggests that the bluestones may have been thought to have healing powers, and people made pilgrimages to Stonehenge just as they do today to Lourdes in France. BBC Timewatch have been following the project. The new series of Timewatch kicks off with a Stonehenge special on Saturday 27 September at 8.05pm on BBC Two. Follow this link to find out more: NEW LIDAR ANIMATION OF STONEHENGE Wessex Archaeology have recently posted an excellent animation of the Stonehenge landscape using a high quality laser scan of the terrain.